There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble

I will admit, at first the endless similes and run-on sentences bugged me. It's stuff like this, where Maye explains why she hates Pat Benatar's 80's hit "Love is a Battlefield:" "Well, um, it's not that I don't like it, but when I hear it, I'm transported back to 1983 and a red headed mongrel of an adolescent with a whitehead the size of a nickel on the tip of his nose is attempting to shove his slug of a tongue down my throat a I'm sitting in a swiveling bucket seat in the front of his dad's Chevy van on the bad losing end of a double date while my best friend has basically completed a conjugal visit with her companion, who just got out of juvenile detention the week before setting fire to an apartment building."

Or, "Once they got the incredible news that Charlie had been chosen to join the faculty at Spaulding University, things had to happen as quickly as the ceremony for a Catholic girl who needs to get married." (Okay, not one of the more endless examples, but phrases like this come fast and furious in the first few chapters and it tended to overwhelm.)

And Maye's painful adventure moving to a small, Pacific Northwest town brought back painful memories of my own, when I was kicked out of the mom and babies group I'd joined to make friends after moving to a small island in Washington's San Juans. But Maye's experience, which started out hitting too close to home, ended up becoming hilariously and fabulously over the top in every way.

And, by the end of this story, I was in love with Maye and Spaulding, and of course, Ruby.

Laurie Notaro has a new fan.

When I first, started this book, I found it a little hard to get into. I had only read a few of Laurie's books, and they were the short, embarrassing stories about her youth and young adulthood. Always one who loves others who can admit when they've made an asshole out of themself, I wasn't entirely sure if this book was fiction or not (another Christmas present on the kindle, and I didn't read the title, I just saw that it was by an author that I had previously read and liked. I was going on good faith, here). Once the plot started to go, I found that it was a little slow to pick up, but when it did, I was hooked. I didn't want to put it down.

The one thing I liked about this, was that while it is probably considered "chick-lit", it wasn't your typical formulaic book. And anyone who has ever moved to a new town, far away from everything they knew, can feel for Maye, who was uprooted to a judgemental "hippie" town, where she found it hard to make friends. I've been there. Maye is a girl, akin to Laurie, who made an asshole out of herself, and never let it stop her. She got up, dusted herself off, and went back out and tried again, despite some highly embarrassing moments.

I love Laurie's wit and sarcasm. It shows in her writing, and she's quickly becoming a favorite of mine.

Ruby Spicer earned this an extra star.

There's a (slight) chance that this may not be a very good book.

Maye Roberts is a thirty-something freelance journalist living in Phoenix, Arizona who is suddenly uprooted to a small town of Spaulding, Washington when her husband is offered a teaching post at the local University. Maye struggles to make friends in the new town and instead finds herself in several embarrassing situations. She even manages to develop an enemy or two, including the local postman who thinks her dog is a menace and the wife of the Dean of the University, Rowena Spaulding, who is a descendant of the sewer pipe magnate for whom the town is named.

Eventually Maye decides to enter the local sewer-pipe pageant (open to all ages and genders apparently) in an attempt to be more likeable. To do so however, she must have a sponsor in the form of a previous sewer-pipe pageant Queen. Her best chance is to locate the mysterious Ruby Spicer, who 50 years ago was the town's most beloved pageant Queen, but who left town shortly after her reign ended and was never heard from again (all of which happened at about the time as an unexplained string of arsons). It is up to Maye to find Ruby, practice her singing-dog pageant act and solve the arson case, all in the pursuit of finding a single friend to make Spaulding feel a little more like home.

Laurie Notaro is a humor writer and this was her first novel. I read an on-line review and thought I would enjoy this, in the same way I enjoyed Dave Barry's first novel, "Big Trouble." Unfortunately, this didn't measure up. I'm still trying to sort out the reasons why, but I have a few theories.

First, Notaro seems intent on making nearly everyone in Spaulding a freak. Dave Barry does similar things with his Floridian characters, but because our protagonist, Maye, is from the big city, the effect is of an outsider coming in and mocking the local culture. The vegan meet-up, the cult-like recycling rules, the Wiccan book club, the jogging mailman, all of it feels like nothing more than a subject for ridicule. For me it didn't come across as very funny - more just cruel. I think the difference with Dave Barry is that when I read his stuff about Miami, I always feel like I am looking inside out. Barry actually has some affection for his characters and is not merely trying to mock them.

Second, despite the fact that everyone in Spaulding is dysfunctional in some way, Notaro doesn't push the silly hard enough. There is a strong thread of absurdism in the novel (e.g. a killer raccoon makes an appearance) but this is juxtaposed with the continued normalcy of Maye - as if she is the only sane person in Spaulding. I think the novel would have worked better for me if the absurd situations had continued to escalate. Dave Barry's books always wind up with scenarios that are so far-fetched that no one would believe them. In a Barry novel, the initial set-up in reality is long forgotten by the end and the reader feels a little breathless, like they just completed a thrilling amusement park ride. Reading this book felt more like jolting along in a broken down car with a transmission problem. Start. Stop. Start. Stop. The absurdist arc needed to keep moving on, like something the late Douglas Adams might have written

Finally, the plot is simply too predictable. Everything is telegraphed and nothing feels terribly original. Now, I'm not a stickler for originality in plotting. Obviously many of our greatest works of art borrow stories, themes and motifs from the past. But if you're going to rehash old ideas, I think you should at least do so with style and panache. We continue to read variations of the "Romeo and Juliet" story because we like new variations on a theme. But this book does not seem to offer anything particularly new to a hackneyed story, either in terms of plots twists or unique style. It is neither particularly funny nor particularly mysterious and I found myself mostly just happy to be done with it.

My best description of this book? Imagine a Lifetime movie written by Dave Barry and you might come up with something like this. Recommended only if you have very few options for what to read - or insomnia.

This one really didn't do anything to me one way or the other. Thirty-something Mae is excited to be moving from Phoenix to a small town in Washington with her husband, who is taking up a position in the local university's English department. What doesn't occur to her is that, when you're at that age, childless, & planning on working from home, it can be kind of difficult to make friends - especially in a small town where everyone knows each other already, & especially when your penchant for getting yourself into ridiculous situations makes everyone think you might be crazy. Luckily, it turns out that the town has a bizarre kind of pageant for which anyone is eligible, the more outrageous your talent, the better. Of course Mae decides to sign up.
Most of the scenes in this book that other readers may consider hilarious just seemed painfully awkward to me, & some of them rather stretched my belief. There's also a bit of a mystery involving a couple of the older, former pageant queens that has potential, but comes to a strange & slightly less-than-satisfying conclusion.

It's been awhile since I attempted to read this book but I disliked it so thoroughly that I can still remember it. The title is the only amusing aspect of this book--nothing else is humorous. The author tries way too hard to make the novel funny--all the "humor" is forced. The main character (whose name I forget) does so many stupid things and acts so ridiculously (this apparently was supposed to be the humor) that she is unlikeable and unbelievable. I gave up about 30 pages in because I found the character so detestable. Wouldn't read anything by Laurie Notaro every again.

This book was fun and ended up being better than I thought when I first started reading it. The novel thing is different from her normal style of writing, and I was open to it, but was at first disappointed with the similarity to her normal anecdotal style since none of it was actually true. I still wonder how much of it came from reality. The main characters are clearly based on her and her husband, but I assume everything else is completely fabricated. And yet, it almost has a quality of "what-if" about it. Like some real-life situation sparked her imagination to think that what-if.

Anyway, I was somewhat skeptical from that beginning point, but as the story wore on I enjoyed it more and rather liked it in the end.

OMG this book is laugh out loud, spew coffee out your nose funny!! Just fabulous. Reviews of her stuff seem to be fairly divisive -- you either get her or you don't apparently. I totally get her. Any of y'all who read my book musing here know that I don't "do" reviews. I figure if you wanna know what the book is about you'll trundle on over to Amazon like everyone else does, so I just give you my view of what I read. Hey! My Goodreads page, my rules.

Give this one a try. I just downloaded her newest book, Spooky Little Girl. I'm not going to attempt a Diet Coke with this one.