All the disapointment - Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

This has cropped in my review feed a couple of times recently which reminded me that I've been eager to read it for some time now; I *love* Allie Brosh's blog. Luckily, my local library's magical online catalogue revealed they had a copy so off to town I went. I actually ended up wandering around my library for about fifteen minutes feeling confused because I couldn't find the 800's - they turned out to be on the mysterious third floor up to which I'd never been but will again. There were some people having a croissant party. You don't get things like that on the second floor. The second floor was full of children singing "The Wheels On The Bus".


Brosh is rather like David Sedaris if Sedaris chose to illustrate his books with all the tools MS Paint has to offer. Like Sedaris, her likeability for me turns out to be dependent on the medium through which she is filtered. Unfortunately, its not high with this book.

As others have commented, the transfer from blog post to book does not serve Brosh well. The fact that so much of this is recycled material - I'd forgive a third, just about, but this is closer to half - only highlights the problems: when the images are shrunk down they lose their impact significantly and this is especially noticeable in stories such as Depression - I've read it dozens of times and will probably read it dozens more, but in physical form it's nothing.

It's also disappointing that the strongest stories are the old ones - like The God of Cake and Depression parts one and two etc. I did really like a couple of the new ones, especially Lost In The Woods, but I actually ended up skimming the last few stories.

I got this from the library but had I parted with money I would certainly consider it a waste of. It's fun, but I don't really see the advantage of Hyperbole in book form - there's not enough new stuff and old stuff becomes significantly less entertaining. 2 stars.

Well, thank God that's over - The Rose Cord by J D Oswald

[The Rose Cord is a direct follow-up to Dreamwalker, so please be aware this review contains spoilers for that book. Also, this is a long book and the beginning was a long time ago and has been wiped from my memory: I appreciate a heads-up on any details I've got wrong]

I reached the end of The Rose Cord earlier than I anticipated due to an extract of the next book being included. I was glad. This is the kind of book which makes me want to shake the author; there is a decent novel in here with some brilliant details and fabulous ideas, but it's been buried in one of the most tedious and repetitive things I've read in ages. You know the second series of Game of Thrones where Rob Stark spent 86 hours looking grumpy in a variety of fields? The Rose Cord is basically that, but without Mike from Casualty.

At the end of Dreamwalker, Benfro, a dragon, watched his mother beheaded by Inquisitor Melyn, head of the warrior priests and all round disliker of things scaly. The Rose Cord picks it up in the next scene: Benfro flees through the woods before returning to the village to find everybody he has ever known slaughtered. On the advice of the memory of his mother, Benfro heads north in search of Corwen, a mage dragon who taught Morgwm, but instead he finds something else: the remains of the great and legendary dragon Magog, and his unreckoned jewel...

Meanwhile, Errol Ramsbottom, Warrior Priest-in-training and (unbeknownst to him) heir to the throne, is trying to learn how to keep Inquisitor Melyn out of his head. As in psychic powers, not trepanning. Melyn, though, has a job Errol is just *perfect* for...

To begin with, The Rose Cord is pretty good despite some minor issues, but unfortunately these are the same issues which will come back to haunt it later: repetition. Rather than having a single scene which achieves all it needs to, Oswald has a habit of having his characters plod through a similar situation multiple times advancing their understanding only a small amount with each.

For instance: Beulah, the young Queen occupying Errol's throne, discovers a plot to kill her, so she deals with it in her own inimitable way: kills her would-be assassin and shouts at everybody for a bit. Naturally, he was not acting alone, so there's another would-be assassin to deal with. And then there's another.

Although each scene is different, and each moves the story forward in it's own vital way, it's a good example (within the first 13%) of how the scenes should be working harder and doing more.

Benfro suffers from this problem the most. In Dreamwalker he was entertaining and tremendously likeable, but with the removal of the villagers he's mostly a dragon wandering through a wood. He occupies the bulk of the book but vast swathes of it involve him being on his own not doing a great deal and it's all the more frustrating because there is gold them thar chapters, it's just not worth the trog to get to. Plus, doing so requires reading about Malkin the squirrel, a character I would happily watch taken out at dawn.

The pacing, too, is wrong. From 70% I was reading believing it would get better - the third in the series is already out in ebook with the paperback happening soon; there is going to be a forth. From 88% I was reading with the glazed determination of somebody who's read that much and is jolly well going to finish just so she can write a fair review of the damn thing. The great dramatic end-scene is crippled by the billion pages of Benfro-is-in-a-cave which precedes it. Throughout, so much space was given to things not happening that when something did, it was ... lost.

Errol has more to do in this book and his is a far stronger story than in the first, but for much of the book - as in Dreamwalker - he is at the mercy of things which happen *to* him, and he's too bland for me to care much. His story is more engaging, but not enough to carry the book.

I liked Dreamwalker a lot - I gave it four stars - but The Rose Cord is weeping for structural edit so hard I do wonder if this is the original self-pubbed text and a new version will get introduced close to its November paperback release date. There are some really great ideas in The Rose Cord, but the last 15% (of this 476 page book) is shear tedium; I won't be continuing with the series: 2 stars.

If I wanted to spend time with a man like this, I could just leave my house - The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison

[A Note: I'm going to give you a SPOILER ALERT because at times this review refers to things which happen quite far along in the book, but any actual spoilers and specifics have been put in highlightable textblocks].

I have a particular pet hate about books: I really hate misleading blurbs.

I hate blurbs which tell you what happens in the book more than 15-20% of the way through.

The blurb for The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving tells us that Benjamin Benjamin and his charge Trevor, a 19 year-old with MD, travel across America to see Trev's dad.

They set off at around 47%.

Happily, the preceding hundred or so pages are spent showing us what kind of person our narrator is while very, very slowly trying to build up tension about the exact circumstances in which his kids died. Unfortunately, he's a casual misogynist who needs to spend some time googling Schroedinger's Rapist. If it made a difference to the story in some way, great, no problem, but I didn't feel it did. If it had felt deliberate, again, great, no problem, but this didn't.

At one point I was ready to put it down unfinished: Ben stalks a woman he went on a date with (he was supposed to go out and get laid - the assumption is she's fine with that) to her place of work and then mentally calls her a bitch because she - having previously signalled her disinterest in him - arranges for a colleague to serve him.

But, people like this exist. Lots of them. And having one exist in fiction is not a bad thing any more than having serial killers and paedophiles is, it's just not what I want to read. The bad thing was that after those first hundred pages *poof*, he's no longer like that. And maybe you could argue this was his character arc, that he was redeemed by the decision to take Trev to visit his dad and by the hours spent in a car with the Spiritually Noble White Trash Girl - (c)The Ghost Of Charles Dickens - but actually what happens is that they spend some time in a car together and he isn't the jerk he previously was. Maybe she farts sedatives.


Once the lads do set off - well, it's weak. It feels far too much like it's actively trying to emulate Little Miss Sunshine. A jazz hands of "kooky" characters is assembled in a very obvious type of way and Trev and Ben pretty much stop being the people they were before and become cliché (Trev) and whatever the narrative needs him to be (Ben). Throughout the book Ben's character lacked fidelity for me in lots of tiny ways - I have trouble with the idea that a stay-at-home dad (to a son and a daughter), is unable to see women as people unless the narrative requires him to. It could have been a good point of conflict and tension for him, but it lacks that self-awareness to kick it up a notch leaving me to back away slowly rather than take an interest.

The writing is fine for the most part, although at one point I assumed Ben was having a stroke because a particular description was given twice in close proximity and I took it literally.

As a pedant, I didn't feel the logistics of situation were thought through so Trev's MD felt like a device to get the pieces assembled:

When Ben is arrested, no mention is made of what is going to happen to Trev, or who is going to look after him. No provision was made for the time Ben was in the cell.


Another example of the this meatworld logicfail: Trev plays Xbox games but he doesn't appear to have PC internet access. For somebody with motor difficulties, a voice operated PC would be an obvious tool to have.

And then there is the great emotional payoff that isn't: what exactly happened the day Ben's kids died. It doesn't work: it's not a shock because it's pretty much gone into earlier in the book - I was expecting something new, or some detail, something which would make me view it, and Ben, differently. Instead of being emotional, or going "Ah, now I get it", I was just thinking it's a good job the sprogs did cark it because otherwise this whole book wouldn't have happened. Also, more pedantry to do with the specifics of the situation.

If it hadn't lost me so early, or if Ben had continued to be a misogynistic arsehole throughout the book rather than just the first hundred pages, maybe I would have liked it more. As it is, there's nothing much here to recommend it and it's fairly irritating, especially the whole "lads saved by women" trope.

I'm going to give it two stars and make sure you know it's nothing like Little Miss Sunshine. People who don't see what's wrong with the stalking bit can give it 3. I'm not averse to reading something else from this author, but it would depend on the blurb.