Best To Laugh by Lorna Landvik – 296 pages
Book Blurb:
No one steps up to life’s banquet, holds out her tray, and orders, “Grief, please!” But as a child, Candy Pekkala was served a heaping helping of it. Every buffet line has a dessert section, however, and when a cousin calls with a Hollywood apartment to sublet, it seems as though Candy is finally offered something sweet. It’s good-bye to Minnesota and hello to California, where a girl who has always lived by her wits has a real chance of making a living with them. With that, the irrepressible Lorna Landvik launches her latest irresistible character onto the world stage—or at least onto the dimly lit small stage where stand-up comedy gets its start.
Herself a comic performer, Landvik taps her own adventurous past and Minnesota roots to conjure Candy’s life in this strange new Technicolor home. Her fellow tenants at Peyton Hall include a female bodybuilder, a ruined nightclub impresario, and a well-connected old Romanian fortune-teller. There are game show appearances and temp jobs at a record company and an establishment suspiciously like the Playboy Mansion, and of course the alluring but not always welcoming stage of stand-up comedy. As she hones her act, Candy is tested by humiliation, hecklers, and the inherent sexism that insists “chicks aren’t funny.”
Written with the light touch and quiet wisdom that have made her works so popular, this is classic Lorna Landvik—sometimes so funny, you’ll cry; sometimes so sad, you might as well laugh; and always impossible to put down.
My Review: 2 stars
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Made me laugh at times, but in general this was a disappointing book. I saw this at the library as a brand new release and grabbed it. I was looking for a light palette cleanser of a title after some heavy reading. I’ve only read Lorna Landvik’s Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons and I recall that I enjoyed that (despite the title). Character’s were flat, and the whole things played like a bad sitcom in my head. Did the author really think we didn’t know her “secret” mantra until the end? Please give us some credit Ms. Landvik! There was no substance or meat to this book and the plot lines were predictable… it was, by the end, a very so-so read.
Quotes I liked:
Life’s a shit sandwich, so only eat the bread.”
-“But lately I’ve been thinking secrets do less to protect us than… to stifle us.”
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