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.