Smart Cookie by Elly Swartz (review)

With a family festival on the horizon, motherless Frankie decides to take measures to get her dad a new wife. She creates an online dating profile for him, figuring she can screen applicants and steer him toward the one she chooses. Her best friend, Elliot, is more concerned with finding the truth behind the rumors that there is a ghost haunting the bed and breakfast where Frankie lives with her dad and her grandmother. On top of that, Elliot and Frankie turn amateur sleuths to discover what's happened to a missing man in town; the mystery turns out to be linked to a plot to force the sale of the B&B. The plot threads here run to the chaotic, as if the author were trying to weave together Scooby-Doo with Sleepless in Seattle with an ending straight out of It's a Wonderful Life. While there is mild humor and sweet pathos in some of the scenes, Frankie's character remains emotionally unengaging as she pinballs from hackneyed scenario to hackneyed scenario, never quite understands her grandmother's hoarding problem, and receives no consequences (or narrative payoff) for impersonating her father on a dating site. Frankie's epiphany that she already has the perfect family and that everything is going to be okay is the trope-y end to a trope-laden story; thus there's a taste of every genre here, if not a satisfying bite. KC