OverLondon

Fun style of narration, in keeping with the ambiance of the writing. The writing style is bouncy and irrepressibly silly. The characters are by and large, well constructed, though goofy. The main character is likable, the pirate and her crew are reminiscent of the pirates of penzance. The bookstore owner is odious and despicable, without being evil. The underlying plot is actually solidly constructed. The reason why I only gave it three stars is because, while farts are always funny, there’s a way of delivering a fart story to give it some wit, some edge. It’s the difference between Abbot and Costello and the Three Stooges. Who’s on first is absolutely absurd and silly, but genius. I don’t understand the appeal of the Three Stooges, never have never will. Sometimes the humor in this book is truly funny and sometimes it’s just…um ok. Such as calling a microscope an enlargascope, just for silliness sake, totally disregarding the possibility of coming up with an alternate word that could truly be funny if it showed an understanding of the strange beautiful and sometimes ugly brutality of how new words or remodels of old words follow subconscious rules of etymology. Such as indubitably vs. undoubtedly and converse vs. conversate. The other thing that I found cringey about this book was the subconscious misogyny regarding the way that female characters are portrayed in this book. The book features a dynamic female pirate as a secondary main character; however, a running joke in the book focuses on the size of her breasts. There is also significant time spent on making sure that you know that she is bisexual. This is all well and good if ; say for instance, this character, Purple Reign (eye roll and groan, but okay, though that’s the kind of humor that makes doves mourn) gave as good as she got, if instead of merely being a sort of victim of sexual prurience, expectations and even exploitation, if she had some witty repartee regarding her artistic depiction in wanted posters, that would be funny. This book reads like it was written by some smart and talented junior high school boys, who wear glasses, have terrible acne and can’t get a girl to look twice at them. There is silliness involving men and cross dressing, but overall I think that the authors should put a bit more thought and sophistication to their silliness. Their jokes involving male cross dressing and the characters involved were ok, they managed to just veer away from the titanic iceberg of homophobia. Overall, I think that after they write another book, before declaring it done, they should review some of the jokes and think about silly, but with a bit more structure and bite. I also think that they should have a gay friend and a female friend read and give them feedback on what they thought about the humor in the book. It’s completely ok to make jokes about breasts, but there’s an empowering or a nodding yes that’s just being honest kind of humor and then there’s a simply exploitative and demeaning kind of humor. I hope that the authors get my drift because there are a lot of good things about their writing.