"You Suck: A Love Story" by Christopher Moore

Here's the sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends. Before starting to read, I figured I was better prepared for what to expect, so I thought maybe I'd appreciate this book moore than the first. (Just checking to see if you're paying attention).

Either I was right, or this book was better than the first one. It seemed less cartoonish, but still funny; less silly, but still lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek; still completely unrealistic, but acceptably so. Once again, almost every sentence was a joke, but this time around I was down with it. (In case you were wondering, I put that in italics because that sort of hip-hop phrase is pretty much a foreign language to me).

The star of this book (in my opinion) was definitely Abby Normal. Without her, I'm sure I would not have enjoyed the read. Just imagining the book with her Chronicles excised makes me sad. I loved her naive wisdom, her observations that are at once clueless and astute, and her complete irreverance (disguising, of course, an indelible perkiness). She totally reminds me of Abby from the TV show NCIS who, in the words of my mother-in-law, is "just cute as a button." Keep in mind that my mother-in-law is danged near blind.

After finishing this book, I made the mistake of reading the excerpt from Moore's A Dirty Job, a book which explains the odd scene where Jody meets Charlie Asher. I'm embarrassed to admit that I did not even remember that loose thread until I read the excerpt. But now that I've been reminded, I've just gotta know what the deal is with Charlie. Guess I have to read "Dirty" now. And, of course, having been sucked in (no pun intended), I'll have to read Bite Me, too, which is Moore's upcoming third volume in the Jody the Vampire series. And if YOU are interested in reading the first two chapters of Bite Me, you may do so here, with the warnings that #1, chapter 1 is basically just a rehashing of the entire You Suck book (but you get it all from Abby's point of view, so you know that's OK with me!), and #2, there are a fair number of typos in the text, which is not OK with me, but I managed to grit my teeth and bear it with the assumption that corrections will be made before publication.