So. If I didn't already have a best friend, weirdo musician acquaintances, and if I still smoked and ripped the filters off cigarettes, I'd follow Dr. Hackenbush around like a smitten groupie. Tried early on to figure out what was missing from the story: and it dawned early on, thankfully. Mabel is confident. Self-esteem pours like good scotch in this book. How wonderfully odd! There are gifts in these pages - it's not often I'm fascinated by a fictional character's world enough to look stuff up; I was in. I had to hear what a baritone ukulele sounds like (how far away are we from audio scores for books?! - close, I hope.) Looked up Eric Dolphy, listened to 17 West, and some mp3s of Coltrane's Sound. Liked the way the book was packaged, liked the rejection credits on the back cover; reading those first sets the smartassy tone and puts the reader in the carbon fiber spined world of the artist Hackenbush'ing her way through the ersatz realm of temp bread labor (where self-esteem gets punished regularly), and the free, smokey, dodgy world of the creative born. A treat. I even like the smoke gray cover color. More, please!