Sunday, September 30, 2007

How to Kill Your Husband


(and other handy household hints), by Kathy Lette.

Quickie recap: Ladies like to bitch, and when these 3 ladies get together, their favourite topic is their husbands, otherwise known as the cheater, the mooch, and the never-does-fuck-all.

Quickie review: Oh, I thought the title held such possibilities! The cover itself promises a "hilarious novel" but what I got instead was a book that tries too hard and ends up embarrassing itself. Lette can't stop herself from making cringingly-bad pun after cringingly-bad pun, and the worst part is, you know she thinks she's being clever. It brings the narrative to a screeching halt each time - I just keep picturing a middle aged woman in a fuzzy bathrobe typing away at a novel that she has strung together based on pieces of scrap paper where she has written every little play-on-words she has ever thought up while watching her kid's recital or baking shepherd's pie. The plot went from unconvincing to straight-out unbelievable and there was no sympathy for characters that were too cartoonish to be even remotely relatable.

Quickie recommendation: What, you have to ask? Ugh. No, make that double ugh.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha! I totally agree! I read this s couple of months ago, and got to the point where just one more pun would have driven me crazy. The characters were so busy punning away that it was impossible to feel anything for them at all....

Colin Cleavage said...

Completely agree with this. My wife bought me the book thinking it would annoy me in an amusing sort of way. I was prepared for shallow caricatures and stereotypes, but not for the book to be so badly written. Her attempts to contrive a gag into every sentence ruin any attempt to write a believable character or plot, and she seems unaware or unconcerned whether her ideas work or even make sense, which shows contempt for the reader. Is this really her seventh or eighth book? Nice blog by the way.

Jay said...

Hehe, it pleases me to no end to hear some fellow dumbfounded bashers!