by Truman Capote, published posthumously in 2005 from a manuscript discovered years after the author’s death in 1984, Modern Library, an Imprint of Random House

I was visiting Mt. Dora, Florida, a month or so ago and we went into my favorite little bookstore, Barrel of Books and Games. I wasn’t in there long, but I spotted this book. It is a novella that Capote wrote early in his career, probably before he had published his first book. I thought it would be a quick read, but I was disappointed.

The book is about a wealthy young girl of seventeen living in New York. The author portrays her thoughts and feelings which are definitely flighty. I haven’t read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but I suspect this character had some of the same traits as Holly Golightly in that novel.

The book is hard to read because of the sentence structure and the odd punctuation. It seems that Capota must have had a bowl of colons and semi-colons on his desk and, every time he approached the end of a sentence, he took one out of the bowl, pasted it on the paper, and continued on.

The plot is somewhat interesting, but disjointed and hard to follow. I think Capote’s In Cold Blood was one of the best books I ever read. This one needed a lot of work before it should have seen the light of day. Capote never went back to finish it and it never was professionally edited. It’s too bad as it could have been a much better book.