Making Love

Marius Brill

DOUBLEDAY

Making Love is the world's first self-aware book and it wants to tell you about it's previous reader. When sanitary napkin demonstrator Miranda Brown steals the treatise from the library, little does she know that sinister forces want to destroy it - and that a motley crew of spooks and kooks will do anything to get hold of it.

At first Making Love is a cerebral comic thriller, but it's charms are short-lived: jokes become predictable, the farce heavy-handed, and the wordplay that seems smart at the outset soon develops the distinct whiff of the smart-arse. The 400-plus pages drag on interminably; it may be self-aware, but Making Love is a little too fond of the sound of its own voice.

Gary Marshall