Standard Deviation - Katherine Heiny

I enjoyed this humorous, touching and modern view on family relationships.  Graham is on his second marriage to the vibrant, talkative, hyper-social and younger Audra.  They have a son with Asperger's syndrome and his ex-wife, the cool, perfect Elspeth re-enters their life through Audra's efforts at moving forward.  Dealing with their son's challenges and their own quirks of personality makes for a light story that was fun to read.  But what's with the characters' names?

Quotes:

"Bad deeds--even anonymous bad deeds--came home to roost eventually in the form of a speeding ticket or a court summons, but anonymous good deeds generally went unacknowledged forever."

[on starting over] "It would be ...frustrating to start all over again.  It would be like finding your own footprints while lost in the jungle and realizing you had been walking in circles." 

 Published:  2017  Read: December 2019  Genre: Fiction

Insane City - Dave Barry

I was away on vacation in October and read several books that I need to catch up on.

Dave Barry is a journalist turned novelist out of Florida.  I like his zany sense of humor and the predicaments his characters bumble through.  This book is a story of a groom's (Seth) bachelor party and wedding preparation against that of a Haitian woman and her children trying to get to America.

The madcap hi jinks of Seth's buddies and the quirky characters he meets trying to get back to his wedding after a night of drunken revelry made me laugh out loud.  Seth is marrying a rich, gorgeous Wall Street type attorney with a millionaire Daddy who is none-to-pleased with his soon to be son-in-law.  All these "problems" are contrasted with the story of Laurette, a woman escaping from Haiti with her young children, left adrift in a boat of the shore of Florida and found bobbing near the beach by Seth as he wakes with a hangover.

Seth persists in doing what's right by Laurette despite the harassment of his father-in-law and disapproval of his wife-to-be.  Dave Barry is not all a funny man and makes some serious observations about what is really a problem in our lives.

Published:  2013  Read: October 2015  Genre: Humor

• ISBN-13: 978-0425264720

Secondhand Souls - Christopher Moore

I finished my contract for work and I've been binge reading, a not so bad experience!  I finished this book in one day, how heavenly to read and read and read for as long as I wanted!

Moore writes strange, darkly humorous tales with fast, wise-cracking dialogue.  I've read most of his previous books so I snatched this one when I saw it at the library.

How to describe a Christopher Moore story?  In this one, his hero, Chris, is trapped in a 14 inch high cobbled together body made of spam and mechanical parts wrapped in a shiny robe, the result of almost being killed in a previous book by the forces of evil, three harpies from hell.  The hero's daughter is the queen of death, though only 7 years old.  She's being cared for by a lesbian couple and watched over by neighboring Chinese and Russian? grandmothers.  Chris's girlfriend has an army of meat puppets under her Victorian style home that she makes outfits for.  They are all riled up when the forces of evil return and start stealing souls instead of allowing them to pass on to heaven.  Weird?  That's just the start of it.

I always laugh out loud at Moore's books and the absurd, fantastical, irreverent characters and story line.  Not for the faint of heart.

Published:  2015  Read:  October 2015  Genre: Fiction, humor