Sunday 7 July 2013

Read in 2013 - 23: Making God Laugh

Another free ebook find on Amazon's kindle shop, I only found out now, a day after having finished reading "Making God Laugh" by Charley Warady, that it is actually the sequel to his first published novel, "5ive Speed". Admittedly, come to think of it, I felt that the introductory chapter was rather abrupt, but some authors do that because it is their style and they want to avoid lengthy introductions to each and every character, and not because there is a prequel out already.
Never mind; the average reader of average intelligence (i. e. me) can work out who is who very well and very quickly.

Emily and Foster are a married couple, as are Zara and Donald. So what, you may ask. The tricky bit is that until about a year ago, Zara was married to Foster and Emily was married to Donald, and the daughter of the first couple married the son of the second couple, which means that now Chloe (Zara's and Foster's daughter) and Zack (Emily and Donald's son) have not their wires crossed, but their parents and in-laws. Still, so what? Yes, that is what I thought. Let them be happy, all those newlyweds. But Zack doesn't see it that way. He takes the "inter-marrying" of his parents and in-laws as a personal affront, and like a stubborn child, he refuses to speak to any of them, even when Chloe finds out that she is pregnant, and all four future grandparents should be told.

In the meantime, Emily's alcoholism becomes more of a problem every day, a very challenging case presents itself at the lawfirm co-owned by Donald and his best mates from college, someone finds out they have cancer, and a relationship more or less comes to an end because one of the two parties involved falls in love with the other party, something that was not part of the mutual agreement.

It all sounds like a mixture of contemporary sitcom and addressing very serious issues that can, in one form or other, crop up in nearly everyone's life at some stage. And it IS a mixture of contemporary sitcom and serious issues addressed. What can be more fun and more serious at the same time as love, life and death?

Editing could have been a lot better on this book, I'm afraid. Many times, tenses are thrown about in a manner that suggests this is not a means of style the author uses, but an accident. A few other typos are there, too. (Again: this was a free ebook, so I probably should not expect much in terms of quality.) But still, after the first few chapters I really began to care for some of the characters, most of all Emily. Her struggle with alcoholism is portrayed very realistically, and what she thinks and goes through ties in well with "Craving", the book I recently reviewed in this post.

"Making God Laugh" ends as abruptly as it starts, and I was pleased to find out on the author's website that a sequel is already in the making.

11 comments:

  1. The book has a great title, I think, and an interesting premise but that is too bad it wasn't edited better, per your review. I do love to read reviews and jot down titles to read so am glad I found you :)

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    1. Some of my reading has come about because of what I found on other people's blogs, too :-)
      I know a lot of people won't even notice the typos in this book, and if they do, they are not bothered. I did and do a lot of proof-reading as part of my job, though, and can't switch that part of my mind off so easily.

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  2. Sloppy writing/editing can be so irritating as to get in the way of a good read as, for me, can translation. I recall when Solzenictzen's The Gulag Archipelago was first published in the West the translation was American English and I had great difficulty with the idea of 'raunchy broads' emanating from Russia. Not a particularly rational reaction on my part but, as you will gather, one that irritated me enough for it to have stayed with me for the 40 years since it was published.

    The title of this book reminded me of a saying a friend has "If God didn't have a sense of humour then he wouldn't have created man."

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    1. Not yet 40 years ago, but around 20, I stayed (as was my habit then) on Sicily for the summer with my then husband's family. Looking for something to read (quite a challenge in a household where the parents can barely read and write, and the younger people are glued to the telly for most of the time!), I found an old copy of "Gone With The Wind" in Italian and thought, why not. Opening it, on the first page I found that Scarlett had been renamed "Rossella". That was it. Book closed. I went to the shop and bought a magazine instead.

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    2. The first time I read "War and Peace" all the names were in French (which, given that French was the Court language) somehow seemed natural. One of the subsequent translations I read (I've read it three times) had the names translated into English and I really struggled with that.

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    3. Oops. I put my brackets in the wrong place: sloppy editing. Sorry!

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    4. Raunchy broads in a Russian novel - how brilliant is that. No wonder the ohrase stayed with you.

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    5. Never mind the brackets, Graham. I was still able to understand your comment.

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  3. I am trying to recall a free amazon book that I really liked, and nothing is coming to mind. Still, there are some very inexpensive books they have that I've liked a lot. I'm think publishers are not paying for good proof-reading anymore and it's very jarring to spot some of the mistakes. It just takes me out of the story when, as happened a few days ago, I read that someone took a "tazi" to the airport. Thought that feels like, perhaps, the printer's error.

    Do you feel as though you want to read the first book in this series?

    And I don't think I could handle Scarlett O'Hara being called Rossella!

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    1. Hmmm... I'd like to know how the story continues, but now that I already know that the two couples are going to end up together cross-wise, I don't want to read the first book.

      Sometimes books that usually come at a certain price are offered for free for a limited time, and I seem to have caught this one at such a time; I see that it has a price-tag now.

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