The Beautiful Ms. Bonnie & Traveling Funeral

The Beautiful Ms. Bonnie felt compelled to review this book and warn all potential readers to avoid it! She borrowed the book from me, as I was reading it for my book club, and then she did me the splendid favor of throwing it in the trash. Bonnie said that I should not even donate it to a thrift store as it would be almost criminal to inflict this drivel on someone else.

Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral by Kris Radish LOOKED like it would be a funny and woman-empowering read. The premise is that a "funeral" is arranged by a woman, just before she dies, for 4 of her friends. They've never met each other, and Annie leaves them instructions, tickets, money, sending them off to visit 4 cities of significance to her while she was alive.


Sounds like it could be a two-week adventure and Bonnie thought she'd come to be very involved with the quirky characters throughout the trip. But Bonnie made horrific gagging noises and said that if Annie hadn't already "died", she'd want to kill her herself, along with her martyr-like friends.



Bonnie thinks the biggest problem with the book is. . . well. . . the writing! The author has this maddening habit of taking a sentence (like "She wondered if. . . . ) and then using it like a sentence completion stem, filling in the blank about 10 times, until you wanted to stab the book with an ice pick.

(This would be a typical style, especially the last segment: She wondered if this book was secretly a plot to make everyone pluck out their eyeballs and swear off reading for all time; she wondered if the author's word processor had an obsessive compulsive disorder and had to repeat the same phrases over and over again; she wondered if the sickening silver of the shiny moon would infuse their hearts with the love they felt toward Annie and make them howl in unison at the crack of dawn every day.)

And the worst thing, the absolutely worst thing, about the book was that you really, really didn't care about the characters by the time you get to the end. Except to maybe wish foul things upon them and then have to feel some guilt for that. The Beautiful Ms. Bonnie thinks we all tend to feel enough guilt in life, without having murderous-thoughts-toward-fictional-characters guilt and life is just way, way too short to waste on crappy books.

She gives this book two paws down and the BackYard Cleanup Award.