Friday Poem as Book Review: Beware of the Bouquet

I promise not to make a habit of combining the non-book post with the book review, but this week's prompt from Poets & Storytellers United specifically asked for a quote from "the last book you've read."

That would be Beware of the Bouquet, by Joan Aiken, 1966, Doubleday, 216 pages, a lighthearted romantic-comedy-of-suspense in which TV ad producers get to see the dark side of the perfume industry. One of many duplicate copies of novels that never made the immediate bestseller lists, but that had slow steady sales through and beyond the author's lifetime, that have been sold off cheap by libraries. These are the kind of physical books you want to keep around the house in order to have something beguiling and cheerful to read during a power outage. I started re-reading to pass the time during our last power outage, and was so beguiled I almost regretted when the lights came back on and I could get back to work. I remembered how the story ends but still wanted to share the ride with the characters. A good sense of humor and topophilia, together, has that effect on me every time.

Aiken wrote light verse, and there are some deliciously silly samples in the book, but this poem is based on a line from the admen's conversation about the heir to the formula for the very special new perfume:

"I bet you

she can add two and two,"

and so she can, 

and she can plan

to get an ad copywriter, maybe,

to take care of the baby

she never told her bridegroom she had,

much less his quaint old Dad;

and keep mum

and play dumb

about the circumstances which

left her what ought to make her rich

at a former fiance's expense;

the shallow look, the deep sense.

The formula the company need?

Go, find it--for the baby's feed.

The heiress will land on her feet

as will those she's so quick to cheat

except the biggest fool of all

who's long been hanging, ripe to fall.

All novels by Joan Aiken would

be worth reprinting. All were good.

So...I'll post a regular review of a new book for today's book review, anyway. A friend still has a lot of decorative lamps to wrap, pack, and move, and it'd suit me just fine if a flock of lamp collectors descended on the warehouse we're moving them out of, this afternoon, and bought every one of them.