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Title: Pretty bad..
Review: I hate to disagree with the formidable reviewers before me, but I thought Mother Tongue was a disappointment. First of all, I was interested in the odd quirk of a linguist studying dialect and would have actually liked more details on this. The title suggested the "language" issue would be discussed, however, it really wasn't developed much more than as a plot device. This book was one of those mysteries that just keeps introducing more and more characters (and potential suspects) which confuses the plot terribly - even in the later chapters new characters appeared. I didn't find the immigrant isses as compelling as they may have been and were (in some ways) tangential to the story. Perhaps the book may be a fair "local color"-Southern-small-town story, etc. but it failed as a tightly written mystery.
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