Maslin Watch: Good Grief

Maslin considers Good Grief, which Jennifer Weiner assured me a while back I should read, when I queried her about her blurb. I mention this because of Maslin's opening remarks:

Good Grief is a novel that would dearly like to be The Lovely Bones. So Lolly Winston treats matters of life and death with such incongruous lightness that the book's cover (in pretty, eye-catching, Bones-like hues) features a pair of bunny-rabbit slippers.

Now, I'm still waiting for a copy of the novel, so I can't say much about its content, but if we might be permitted to judge a book by its cover for a moment--and apparently Maslin has given us leave--the comparison I would make is not to Alice Sebold but to Weiner...because the extreme close-up on the legs and feet is stylistically similar to the cover on her debut, Good in Bed. And my impression all along has been that, far from the semi-mystical tone of The Lovely Bones, Winston might be aiming more for the more ordinary chick-littish paradigm of examining a female protagonist's all-too-human responses to setbacks and tragedies as she slowly, but surely, gets back on her (bunny-slippered) feet.

"It's funny how you don't have to be related to someone to love them like family," Sophie eventually realizes, with Crystal in mind. Now there's a line to excite Lynne Truss, the grammar policewoman whose Eats, Shoots & Leaves has also become popular [and also reviewed by Maslin]. In addition to its faulty construction...

Just goes to show, I never particularly thought of "It's funny how..." as a faulty construction, but I suppose, looking at it closely, that it is, and "that" should be used in place of "how." But isn't Lynne Truss actually all about punctuation?