Review: A Great Find
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 5, 2013
When you wander around the dark edges of the free and inexpensive Kindle bookyard you run into a lot of "hysterical, hilarious, funny, hysterically funny, hilariously funny, funnily hilariously hysterical" books, at least according to the blurbers and unknown professional reviewers. And maybe they are and I'm just a big stick-in-the-mud. But I don't think so. What I do think is that writing books is hard, readers of books, especially semi-debut freebies, are for the most part generous and forgiving souls, and even if a book is just sort-of amusing readers are willing to lavish praise on it.Well, all of this blather is just the long way around to saying that I felt that, without exaggeration or puffery, "Proper Job" was a very well written, generous and good-humored book with engaging characters and enough rewardingly funny scenes and lines to make it a fine, entertaining choice. Some of the scenes are pretty slapstick and "madcap", but they feel like part of the fun, not like some desperate attempt to save the book. The characters are busy, not frantic; the situations are silly, not stupid; the narrative is deadpan not dead-in-the-water. Some of the jokes and situations are predictable, but some aren't and end up being pleasant surprises. The author's touch is fairly restrained, and some of the funniest stuff is a bit sneaky, and hidden almost as throw-away lines.  While the protagonists are summer-job-adolescents, the author is clearly a fairly balanced soul who has a rather rueful memory of life at that age and this shaggy dog tale very nicely captures the humor and agony of that time of life.So, a very nice and rewarding find, and you probably will make a chuckle noise every now then. Please note that I found this book while browsing Amazon Kindle freebies. I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.