Born in England on Jan. 1, 1900, the protagonist of My Little Blue Dress stumbles through the 20th century, somehow always arriving at places that encapsulate an era. From a marriage to a WWI vet—an amputee poet, no less—she moves on to rub shoulders with Parisian ex-pats in the '20s, a scene only a few quick jumps from her arrival in 1950s suburban America. Her grasp of detail, however, seems a little foggy, almost as if the book had been assembled from half-remembered history lessons by someone looking to forge the memoir of a 100-year-old woman. That's the setup late-period Spy editor Bruno Maddox employs for My Little Blue Dress, and if it seems too ingenious to work for the length of a book, at least Maddox gives it his best shot in Blue's early chapters. Perhaps the funniest running gag comes from his habit of placing his heroine in environments that shelter her from the actual course of history; after spending much of the '30s in a suspiciously familiar scenario working as a life-affirming nanny to a widowed banker, she develops an "information-phobia" for much of WWII. Is it funny? Sure, but it reads more like a clever short story stretched too far, 30 pages of good material spread out to 300. A mid-book twist (which would be unfair to reveal) only bogs Dress down further. Suffice it to say that readers theretofore pleased with a fitfully amusing parody of the memoir craze might leave feeling duped into reading yet another variation on the young-man-in-the-big-city-blues, as Maddox trades in one genre he recognizes as tired for another that he doesn't.