Publisher's Weekly Review
Humorist Ortberg offers a side-splitting take on famous literary characters from Gilgamesh to Hermione Granger by peeking into their imagined text messages, replete with emoticons, misspellings, and irregular punctuation. Some exchanges update well-known plot points-Goneril intercepts texts from Regan on Edmund's phone and Gertrude offers to bring a tuna sandwich to Hamlet's room. Others exaggerate character traits, like Scarlett O'Hara egging on Ashley to guess what corset she's wearing, or Cathy and Heathcliff one-upping each other about the respective desperation of their love for each another. Ortberg keeps the joke fresh with jabs at various canonical authors, portraying Coleridge interrupted while composing Kubla Khan by "some asshole from Porlock" and Thoreau busily inviting friends and ordering supplies to his "self-sufficient" retreat to the woods. Ortberg gets the most mileage whenever she plays a quirky artist off a nonplussed straight man, whether it's T.S. Eliot's friend explaining "I can't leave work to buy you a peach" or William Carlos Williams's long-suffering wife reading his note that says, "i have eaten the little red wheelbarrow/ that was in the icebox." Ortberg charmingly captures, in short, palatable bytes, what is most memorable about famous books and their indelible characters. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
Originally released online as individual posts, Ortberg's first book satirizes much of the Western literary canon-from classical Greece to The Baby-Sitters Club-in the form of text messages. The author follows the same format for most of the exchanges: one grounded party is perplexed by the antics of the crazy-melodramatic-homicidal-arrogant-nonsensical literary or cultural giant with whom they are texting. In Ortberg's hands, Heathcliff and Cathy try to outdo each other with descriptions of how vicious and gruesome their shows of love will be, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" sounds even more absurd, while Hamlet is portrayed as a moody teenager and Jo from Little Women keeps thinking that her father must surely be dead. Narrators Amy Landon and Zach Villa handle the range of accents and time periods very well, as well as the variety of self-absorbed characters they are called upon to play. -VERDICT Recommended for libraries looking to expand their humor offerings. The work will appeal to anyone seeking bite-sized absurdity in audio format. ["Bibliophiles who enjoy their humor laced with snark will be thrilled to find this book," read the starred review of the Holt hc, LJ 11/1/14.]-Anna Mickelsen, Springfield City Lib., MA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
