Pretty soon I am going to have to stop saying that I hardly ever read books by male authors.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Truth in Advertising, by John Kenney. I liked this one a lot. I wouldn’t say “it reminded me of Augusten Burroughs,” because I think that phrase is used to describe a much stronger similarity than was present. But I WAS reminded of Augusten Burroughs, in that he periodically came to my mind while reading this book. I think a lot of it was the dialogue, which was the kind that made me want to be friends with every single person. And the fact that the main character was in advertising.

Speaking of advertising, I wouldn’t want to oversell the book: there were a lot of flaws and rough spots, and there were entire pages where the narrator stopped using contractions and the lights dimmed except for a single spotlight on the stage so he could do his monologue wondering what REALLY mattered in life. But they were the kinds of flaws and rough spots I found tolerable/skimmable, and I thought there were a lot of times when the author then pulled it right the heck out of that kind of thing in a charming way. The flaws all felt “first-novel-ish” in a way that made me want to see how the next novel would go.

I liked it, I found it funny, and it made me tear up a number of times. If you are still resenting your non-perfect parents but it’s weirder now that it turns out you can’t be a perfect parent either; and/or if you feel like maybe you should have gone into a different career / done something different with your life, there are nice solid chunks of that.

There is a scene that I found hard to handle as a parent—but I DID handle it. So I wanted to mention that it exists, and if you want a spoiler you can email me, but it’s not the kind of thing where I thought that if I’d known about it beforehand I wouldn’t have read the book. I just had to sort of breathe carefully and not picture anyone I knew in that situation.

(photo from Amazon.com)

The Shelter Cycle, by Peter Rock (which is an interesting name, for those of us who spent a lot of time in Sunday School). Speaking of scenes that are hard to handle as a parent, this book has a kidnapping theme. I avoid those AUTOMATICALLY: like, I’m in the library reading book jackets, and I see “When a child disappears from a small town…” and the book is back on the shelf before the word “NOPE” has fully formed in my brain. This book handles it in a way I found just barely tolerable; for example, it doesn’t show us the parents’ point of view. Again, if you think you’d be interested in the book but only if you had further spoilers (like if you need more details, or if you need to know ahead of time if everything turns out okay or not), you can email me.

I would have liked to have known ahead of time that The Church Universal and Triumphant is a real church, and that they really did build shelters in the 1980s so that they could wait out a predicted apocalyptic situation. It’s not like you have to know it actually happened to read the book, but it does add an element of interest. The story is about two kids who grew up in that church at that time, and how it affects them as adults. I felt like the female character was sketched-but-not-drawn, which is often my problem with books by male authors. (Quite likely there’s the same problem with female authors and male characters, but I notice it less because I’m not male).

I liked it and felt like it gave me a lot of interesting things to think about. For me, a downside is that it’s the kind of book where mystical things happen but you don’t know if they’re real or not; for others, this would be a major upside.