Review: Gleefully Irritated
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 18, 2014
When I think of texts, there are two descriptors that immediately jump to mind – drama and short.  Texting is usually chock full of exclamation points, abbreviations, heavy words that convey huge meaning and very few of them.  Texting was always meant to be a quick, shorthand way of communicating with other people.  Quick questions.  Quick updates.  Quick check-ins.  But ongoing communication can rarely be confined to short words and shorter sentences.  It often blows up without our permission into something much more dramatic and greedy than we ever intended.Textual Encounters 2 picks up with a new character.  We get introduced to Katie as she finds Christine’s phone in the back of a cab, gets nosy and then gets thoroughly embroiled in the drama that was Jake and Christine.I have to be honest and say I am not a fan of Katie.  She’s young, impetuous and utterly annoying.  She sticks her nose in where it really has no business and given that she’s in med school and will soon be making life and death decisions for other human beings, she’s very, very immature.  But she serves a purpose in tying together several characters into one cohesive story, so as a plot vehicle, she’s extremely useful.Jake is back with his funny and open ways – baring his soul to a stranger yet again.  But as the story continues we start to see that Jake has woven a web around himself that while he thinks it keeps him balanced, may very well end up resembling more of a noose than a safety net.Morgan Parker has again worked his magic to expand this story and world exponentially with this book while still getting me to invest so deeply in the characters.  Even those characters I don’t like.  I waited with just as much trepidation for their responses as I did the characters from which I wanted pages of text.  He has again taken seemingly one-dimensional characters and not only proven how multi-faceted they are, but also continued to weave humor, passion and mystery through the entire story.This book sends all characters careening through cyber space towards a giant train wreck spewing drama all along the way.  And it’s absolutely going to be one of those situations where you really don’t want to watch, but you just have to.  I will be waiting, on the edge of my seat, for the third book even though I know it’s going to be ugly and brutal.  It’s also going to be fantastically fun to read.