Publisher's Weekly Review
Canadian Richardson's folksy debut, The Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast, won him a cult following among devotees of the middle-aged idyllic (think Northern Exposure or A Year in Provence). The same readership will no doubt enjoy this sequel, another hodgepodge of household hints, homilies, recipes and assorted minutiae dropped like currants into the everyday misadventures of the 50-ish fraternal twins who operate the Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast on an island off the coast of British Columbia. This time the trivia-laden, haphazard plot leads an impractical handyman to the lost combination of the household safe, where the brothers find a sheaf of encrypted poems. Add cute subplotsadventures in parenting by a pair of lesbian lovers, a duplicitous photo shoot arranged by the sociopathic editor of a tattler magazine and the romance between a predatory newspaper columnist and the less repressed of the bachelor twinsand you have the offbeat ingredients of a warm, pleasant pudding of a novel. Already a bestseller in Canada, this homely little bookdespite its sometimes strained attempts at humorought to find favor below the border with readers whose preciousness-threshold is appropriately high. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A sweet nothing of a sequel to Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast (1996), a collection of recipes, book lists, and slightly silly narrative noodlings about the lives of fraternal twins Hector and Virgil, their pets, their guests, acquaintances, and idle hours at their British Columbian island retreat. When we last left the brothers, whose stories have become Canadian broadcaster Richardson's coyly amusing stock-in-trade, life was close to perfect, even if the inn's assortment of eccentric, blue-haired guests could be counted on to set off controversies about breakfast garnishes and yogic breathing. After being offered lists of the brothers' favored cookbooks, some peculiar recipes, and titles appropriate for lavatory reading, we learn that Hector has adjusted to his intermittently passionate relationship with lubriciously feminine journalist Altona, and Virgil, who still can't abide the sound of a saxophone, can smile kindly on the fishy belches of Waffles the cat. The brothers have taken on a handyman, Caedon Harkness, an unemployed roof-thatcher and proud owner of Canada's only thatched-roof mobile home. Harkness was found acceptable by Mrs. Rochester, the inn's Bible-quoting parrot, and now shatters the mornings by humming arias from Tosca and Turandot as he dusts. A whiff of a plot appears about 70 pages in, when local poet Solomon Solomon, disreputable lecher and drunk, is apparently incinerated when his 12-foot-thick ball of cigarette foil is struck by lightning. Could the mysterious, coded manuscript found in a locked safe behind a bad painting in the brothers' inn be the poet's perverse masterwork? Did he know the bachelors' long-deceased mother? And, oh, yes, does anybody need a recipe for bottled pickles? Harmless, sweetly miscellaneous glimpses into a pastoral paradise that, at its best, resembles its author's definition of a good bathroom book: so ``sufficiently pithy that it can be absorbed in brief spurts.''
