Novels range from outstanding to insufferable

There's a little bit of everything in our spring fiction roundup — novice novelists as well as those who've been around the bookcase and back, books that make you laugh and those that put a giant lump in your throat.

Need the one-minute rundown? Standouts this season: Ali Smith's "The Accidental" and "Gentlemen and Players," by "Chocolat" author Joanne Harris. Books to skim or skip: Ayelet Waldman's "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits" and Paul Auster's "The Brooklyn Follies."    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

School days
What could possibly go wrong inside the elegant, hushed, halls of a classy English boys' school? In "Gentlemen and Players," (William Morrow, $25) written by Joanne Harris, author of the beloved "Chocolat," the answer is everything, and the reader is slowly stripped of any preconceptions that such a quiet refuge was ever safe in the first place.

Two of the "Gentlemen and Players" alternate chapters in this delightful book, which invites a slow, savoring read. One, a longtime professor at snooty St. Oswald's, has taught for so long he's practically composed of chalk dust, and his sense that the school cannot possibly be caving in around him stands even when all else falls. The other narrator is a newcomer to St. Oswald's, but one with a haunted history regarding the school, a history that is revealed only in bits and pieces, slowly filling in the details of a fiendish and complicated plot.

The book is a mystery, sure, but more than that, it takes its place next to such polished tales out of school as Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" and Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep" as another tome that reminds us of the horrors and joys academia can bring. Harris' nuances about the various characters on the faculty and among the student body rarely ring a false note, and her intricate plot unfolds as believably as a good movie. Going back to school is sometimes a good thing.    —G.F.C.

Blog ‘Days’
Numerous publishing companies now have published books by authors who were discovered via their Weblogs. But there needs to be an edict: Do not allow said writers to write about Weblogs. Urge them to use the creativity that presumably attracted a publisher in the first place and stretch their imaginations, move out of the blog world and set their plot somewhere (anywhere) else.

Ana Marie Cox was the original voice of the snarky D.C. gossip blog Wonkette, and her first novel, "Dog Days" (Riverhead, $24) is about ... a woman writing a snarky D.C. gossip blog called Capitolette. It's not a bad book, but the blog plotline is the dullest part of it. Campaign staffer Melanie and her best friend start Capitolette, it becomes enormously famous almost instantly, and to protect their jobs, they hire a blonde bimbo to pretend she's the writer. Predictably, it ends badly.

Plenty of thinly veiled public figures populate the book, including a John Kerry-esque candidate and Swift Boat veteran-style attack group. That plotline feels like the two-year-old news it is, but there's a saving grace to "Dog Days." Cox can write. Melanie may be obsessed with her Blackberry (did they pay for such stellar product placement?) and her affair with a married magazine journalist, but she comes across as likable and human, as if she really never bought into the brand names and party life to which she professes to aspire. At the end of the book, she's left Washington behind. If Cox does the same with her next novel, it's likely to do well.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

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