All Bottled Up

Yay! I just got a message from my UK agent saying that she totally loves my genie novel All Bottled Up. I thought she would, since she adores Matchbox and it's similar in tone, but I hadn't heard anything for a few weeks. It's part of a trio of "lighter" novels for which I have written either the entire manuscript (The Matchbox) or the proposal All Bottled Up). The books are all linked, but they're stand-alone as well. It's kind of fun to write cheerier, slapstick stuff, though there is enough darkness/quirkiness in all three so that I don't feel like I've sold out. They're like Gregory Maguire's Wicked, I guess. Which is no bad thing. It doesn't have to be all angst and tenderness, all the time, and that doesn't mean it's being dumbed down, either. You know, I liked Stardust just as much as I liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and that's quite a bit.

The main character in All Bottled Up, Morgan Mothrey, is very fond of perfume bottles, and so that chimes in nicely with my most recent post.

Here is the synopsis:

All Bottled Up
synopsis

Novel: 65,000 words. Setting: current-day Portland, Oregon.

Food tester and minor cable “celebrity” Morgan Mothrey invokes a genie, a good-looking fellow name of Jim Scox, who starts to fulfill all of her dreams, despite his great love of bad puns and anagrams. But soon she discovers that, as a textbook chauvinist pig, he has desires of his own, ones that she finds herself fulfilling as well. It’s the ultimate battle of the sexes, one that makes Taming of the Shrew look like I Dream of Jeannie, and one which turns the whole genie myth upside down and gives the bottle a few shakes to boot.

For as the gameplay and wordplay and stakes with Jim Scox grow higher and more complex, and her own ambitions and wishes ever more grandiose (Twelve swimming pools filled with green champagne! Six boyfriends slavishly devoted to her every whim who all can cook as well! Seven-league high-heels! A functioning remote control!), Morgan begins to realize that some of the power might be her own. And not just in a post-feminist metaphor way, but really her own: all signs are pointing to the fact that she is herself an incarnation of the well-known genie Gremory, who was depicted in 1583 by Johann Wier as “appearing in the form of a beautiful woman with the crown of a duchess tied around her waist, and riding a camel”. This troubles Morgan, to say the least. Particularly the camel.

It’s also troubling that Jim the Genie’s power seems to be waning as the perfume in his bottle dries up, and unless she figures out his latest oneupmanship battle-of-the-wits puzzle with which he’s been baiting her, one which involves a trio of his ex-girlfriends, the genies Wickifer, Djinnifer and Nancy, she’s screwed (back into her own bottle, it seems).

Most troubling of all is the fact that Morgan and Jim are falling head over heels in love. This is despite the bad puns and fierce rivalry.

Part fairy tale, part detective story, all word play, All Bottled Up reminds us in all the best possible ways that common anagrams for “I dream of genies” are “a fireside gnome”, “faerie smidgeon” and “maiden fries ego”.

Just as in The Taming of the Shrew, here’s to frying all egos, always sunnyside-up.