A Report on Fan Reaction to Smelled a Rat

It's been about three months since I read Smelled a Rat, and I've lately discovered an odd thing - I can't really remember what happened in it. Granted, though I think I'm pretty darn good on analysis, I haven't the best memory of Cat Who... minutiae, but ask me about the little sub-plots in, say, Went Underground, and, off the top of my head, I'll recall at least a couple B-plots (Mildred's fight against parade candy-tossing, Qwill, Roger, and Bushy getting marooned on Three Tree Island) and a couple things that stand out in my mind as having liked (Iggy's manner of speaking, Qwill under suspicion). But here, I'm simply drawing a blank. I just now had to go over my review to be reminded of the very existence of two events that I thought at the time were among Smelled a Rat's more successful elements, the silent auction and the haiku contest. Much of the book just totally did not stick in my mind. (Seems that Chinese-food comparison I made in the review was more relevant than I thought.)

But, then again, neither did it stick in the minds of most other fans, it seems, whose response to Smelled a Rat has been remarkably muted. There's been comparatively little discussion of the book in the fan realms - not much on either mailing list, and most of the limited chatter there has been devoted to attempts at unraveling that oblique pyramid clue - and considerably fewer responses to this site's "What did you think of...?" poll than there were to the Robbed a Bank equivalent. Robbed a Bank, of course, had the Qwill-burning-the-letters controversy, which seems to have become the new why-was-Iris-Cobb-killed-off lightning rod for fan discontent, to provide seemingly endless fodder for posts and e-mails, but the lack of Rat-related discourse is outright odd nonetheless.

Amazon.com might be able to shed some light on the situation; I check the Cat Who... reader reviews there fairly frequently, and the ones for Smelled a Rat are eyebrow-raising not only in their low numbers - only 19 as of this writing, about half what other recent books had garnered at this point after their releases - but in the lack of strength and true unity or diversity in the opinions expressed. Whereas in recent years, Amazon reviewers vehemently defended or attacked new releases for a variety of personal reasons (with the majority usually falling on the latter side), Smelled a Rat short-takes fall into two narrow camps of opinion - 1) the book isn't the author's best but is a pleasant return to "vintage Braun" and quite enjoyable, or 2) the book isn't blindingly horrible (Saw Stars often comes up in reference here), but is meandering and empty. The reasoning for either side is almost always cut from the same respective aforementioned cloths, and the resulting reviews, save for the relief expressed by Rat devotees at the series's apparent rebirth, are almost always rather...mellow, actually - which might help account somewhat for the lack of discussion. The people who liked Smelled a Rat are pretty content, if only with the reassurance that the series is getting back on the right track. The people who didn't didn't think it lacking enough to warrant great outrage or extensive kvetching. Smelled a Rat doesn't really stir either side to a passionate defense of their position.

The reviews, however, are mostly on the positive side; the book has a four-star (out of five) rating at Amazon at the moment and has inarguably been better-received than Saw Stars or Robbed a Bank. Looking over fan feedback and taking fans' happy claims of the Cat Who...s "returning to form" into account, I can divine three popular reasons for Smelled a Rat's resurgence -

1. Practically everyone in the old supporting cast got at least a passing mention. For me, the myriad cameos weren't satisfying and smacked of tokenism, but token or not, they were a bone thrown to readers who were looking for some similarity to the old, fondly-remembered books that drew them into the Cat Who... world. And successful or not, they could be viewed as an attempt to recreate the Moose County readers love and as an affirmation that the author remembers the series's history.
2. There was some semblance of an involved mystery. To again reiterate, the ideas here could've, with proper development, cooked up as richly intriguing a mystery as those which graced the best of the pre-Lived High country installments (and Wasn't There, for that matter). Just having the building blocks present, though, whether or not they added up to a larger picture, was another reminder/remainder of the old books.
3. Nothing outrageous or controversial happened. No alien spaceships dropped by. Qwill didn't set fire to anything. (Well, Edd did die, and the matter of his death was saddening, but the character didn't charm the masses as Iris did, and the event was hardly given the pause to make anyone care.) In other words, there was no one event to strenuously object to or which terribly upset the apple cart. For some folks, this actually tied into #2: "There was no high-tension, but that is one reason that I enjoy Ms. Braun's stories", writes one Amazon reviewer, and that lack of tension, in this train of logic, is presumably conducive to the easygoing, "small-town atmosphere" prized by fans.

What I suppose I'm trying to express here is that I feel that, while indeed a nice attempt (attempt) to return to previous form, a "breather" is not what the series needs right now, because (to return to the issue raised in the first paragraph) one of its current big problems is the forgettability of what has now, in the absence of a strong mystery, become the meat of the books, the small-town material. (Which is a puzzling aspect to the widespread acceptance of Smelled a Rat - it essentially still has most of the same problems as the other recent, weaker entries.) It needs something galvanizing to get it completely refocused - some sort of jolt that Braun has perhaps been seeking through the introduction of a slew of new characters who, so far, haven't been well-developed enough to pull their own weight (the pleasant Maggie Sprenkle notwithstanding), much less that of an entire series. The theory that the onslaught of new locales and personnages signals that Braun is getting sick of the Moose County setting comes to mind here; if that is true, perhaps it might be a good idea for her to write another book like Moved a Mountain to give Qwill a change of scenery and herself the opportunity to start with a fresh slate and get some of the frustration and restlessness out of her system. It's a bit drastic (even though it'd be an only temporary change), and it's heading in exactly the opposite direction the fans are pulling in, but it'd be worth at least a shot. Perhaps it'd even produce something truly memorable.

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