there is no way this book deserves 3 stars. droll? clever? smart? don't be ridiculous. I agree with a prior poster who suggests that this might have made a decent short story - but its far too weak of a premise/joke to spread over an entire novel...it reminds me of the jokes that take 15-20 minutes to tell and don't have a funny punchline on purpose...the joke teller gets satisfaction from wasting the time of his audience...maddox certainly wasted my time with this book...the only reason i bothered finishing it was because i friend of mine recommended it to me...

This is a bad book. Bad in the not at all good way. The fact that the book more or less rests on the oh-so-clever premise of "this is a bad book on purpose" in no way excuses the fact that, folks, this is a bad book. Hand me a burger and tell me it tastes bad, but on purpose (wink, wink) does not make the burger taste better. The premise could have possibly worked as a subplot, perhaps the activities of a character, but as the entire plot it failed miserably. Maybe it would have even worked as a short short story. In any case, expanded over what actually did seem like a million pages, it was torture. I don't know why I even finished it other than morbid curiosity that something, in fact, this bad could have been published. Aspiring authors: read this book- it will give you hope that even what you write in your sleep could be published. This was just a plainly bad book. Wink wink or not.

As you'll remember, the last hundred years were boutfifully ripe with subjects for satire. Unfortunately, scores of overpaid memoirists have built careers by taking everything so damned seriously -- and we, the reading public, only enabled them with our indulgence.

To the rescue comes Maddox's first novel. Mordantly witty, mechanically unique, and -- this is the important part -- entirely NOT BORING, "My Little Blue Dress" delivers a hilarious and transparently fraudulent traipse down one smelly centegenarian's memory lane. After the "true" author is revealed, readers are also treated to a dead-on skewering of present day New York and all its vanities (a delight for anyone who loves, or loves to hate, the city). Along the way Maddox manages to make some insightful cultural commentary; thanfully his playful pacing and style prevent the text from degenerating into another steaming pile of theses.

This is a very good book. If enough thoroughly mediocre novels come out, we will one day be calling it a great book, an important book. If enough of us do that, someone will oneday launch a Maddox Studies Program at a small liberal arts college. Hopefully it will happen soon enough that Maddox will be around to make fun of them too.