The author seems not to understand that *readings* of novels -- by contrast with brief synopses of plot -- require alertness to tone, nuance, subtlety, and genre, which in turn requires some understanding of the literary traditions behind the novel in question. While the legal history recounted in Goodman's book is intelligible, if highly arguable at some points, the literary analysis is nearly vapid. Her arguments generally take the form of announcing that the law of torts concerns itself with anxieties about the relation between cause and effect, and then informing us that the plot of the novel under consideration -s -- surprise -- concerned with precisely that. The idea that such anxieties might be differentiated or qualified on the basis of characterization, or the extent of narrative intrusion or absence, or the novel's negotiation of its relation to other books in the same genre -- all these possibilities go unregistered. One would hope that the benefit of having both a JD and a PhD is that they would enable the author to combine the talents of two different disciplines -- but this does not happen here.