Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 320 pages
- Published by: Villard May 29, 2007
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0812975723
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0812975727
-
Book Dimensions:
8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
- Weighs: 0.8 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Humorist Notaro (
The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club, etc.) transitions to fiction with a comic mix of wife lit and smalltown suspense. When Maye Roberts's husband, Charlie, gets a tenure-track job at prestigious Spaulding University, childless, 30-something Maye leaves her tight-knit group of friends and job as a Phoenix reporter to move to the school's eponymous Washington State burg. While Charlie fits in easily, Maye, after a faculty dinner run-in with Dean Spaulding's wife, Rowena, feels lonely and bored. When she learns about the Sewer Pipe Queen pageant, a local tradition that guarantees the winner a town full of friends, she enters with her singing dog, inflaming Rowena further. As tensions thicken, Maye's rather notorious pageant sponsor, Ruby, may hold the key to Rowena's continuing rage and to the decades-old incident that sparked it. Though some of the plot falls flat, Notaro makes Maye's perspective strong enough to hold the story together, and the book is filled with the same winningly acerbic riffs that drive Notaro's popular essays.
(June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Library Journal April 1, 2007
Fans of humorist Notaro will certainly want to pick up her first try at fiction. Readers unfamiliar with her earlier essay collections, e.g., Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club and Autobiography of a Fat Bride, should prepare to laugh loudly and often at her irreverent observations and depictions of life's embarrassing moments. Phoenix reporter-turned-freelance writer Maye relocates with her professor husband to an eccentric college town in the Pacific Northwest. But she has a hard time fitting into the close-knit community and an even harder time making friends. Enter the Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant, a piano-playing Australian shepherd, and a chain-smoking pageant coach, who memorably gives the following advice: "You're fighting a battle of good and evil with your dog pimp! Your only weapon is the shimmy! There is power in the shimmy! Make him fear your shimmy!" Recommended for public libraries and academic libraries with large fiction collections. --Amy Watts, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens
Reader Reviews
Change the names, create an absurd little scenario, and call it fiction. As a fan of Notaro's essay collections, this story, "There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell," didn't surprise or disappoint. It doesn't stretch too far from her roots in writing first person vignettes about a funny, irreverent woman, however, the woman in this story happens to be named "Maye." Maye is clearly a Laurie alter ego, and it helped to have read her earlier collections to get a full picture of this likeable, humble creature. Maye and her husband, Charlie, move from Phoenix, Arizona to Spaulding, Washington, because of her husband's new job. The plot centers on Maye's insatiable quest to make new friends. She is very unsuccessful--mistaking a coven of witches for a book group, infiltrating a meeting of vegetarians only to be busted eating meat later that night, and making a fool of herself at her first faculty gathering by getting stuck in her sweater and doing a striptease of sorts. She makes an enemy of the town matriarch, Rowena Spaulding, and her postman, who makes it necessary for her to take her dog, Mickey, to obedience training. Ultimately, Maye decides to win friends by attempting to win the annual "Miss Sewer Pipe" crown. She obtains a sponsor, the mysterious former Queen, Ruby Spicer, and as their friendship develops, the story grows more interesting. In spite of all the characters bantering back and forth in overly clever repartee and an annoying abundance of similes, I couldn't help but turn the pages just to see how the town pageant would unfold. No great piece of literature, but fans of Laurie Notaro will love this book, and I applaud the author for giving "fiction" a crack, even though according to her acknowledgements, she seemed forced into it. Just keep writing Laurie. You make us laugh. From the author of A Line Between Friends, McKenna Publishing Group.
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