New Favorite Author?

Anyone who knows me personally knows that I adore big books over little ones. There’s just something about the heft of a 500+ page book in your hands and the satisfaction when you’ve completed it. Most recently I plowed through the 517 page Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (the absolutely amazing Hunger Games prequel) in one day, I’m now working on Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, and in the near future I hope to finish Priory of the Orange Tree (over 800 pages!!!).

My attraction to bigger books usually means that I skip over smaller books entirely. It’s a definite fault of mine because small books can definitely still pack an insane punch and be so good (Perks of Being a Wallflower and Stargirl being my best examples of this), but I just tend to gravitate toward big books that will take me much more time to read. I think it’s because for me, a 200 page book can be read in under 4 hours and that’s just not enough time with a character if I really like them.

Anyway, with my internship I’ve had the opportunity to change my reading style a bit as my supervisor has consistently been sending me books of about 200-300 pages that I can read in about a day. As we’ve started to run out of YA books from his company, he’s moved into sending me adult books, which I expected would be longer. So far, not so much.

And believe me, this is fine! If anything, it’s further proven to me that short books really can be powerful. So far, I’ve spent a lot of my time reading adult books (from this publisher anyway) with one specific author, and I truly wish I could give her name here because I HIGHLY recommend her work (or I would if I could).

So far, I think only one out of her three books didn’t leave me in tears, and that’s only because it was a comedy novel. To be fair, all three books have their share of laughs, but two of them are a perfect blend of comedy and seriousness that make them a pure delight to read. The third is just straight comedy in the best way (nothing raunchy and needlessly explicit, which is something that frequently annoys me about modern comedy). And with each book she achieves this in around 200 pages!

While her pure comedy book centers around a young woman who inadvertently made a deal with the devil and now works for him by sending despicable sinners to hell (a job which she tries to escape), the others focus on a woman fulfilling her bucket list after a fatal cancer diagnosis and a woman prone to failure trying to help a nine year old boy achieve his magical dreams before his birthday. You may be wondering how a book involving a cancer diagnosis could possibly be humorous, but I know from experience that it’s possible (see The Fault in Our Stars, please).

I think what really impresses me about this author is her skill with comedy. First of all, comedy is so difficult to translate into the written word, in my opinion mainly because of timing. Performers can make their comedy physical or hit their audience with the perfect timing, but that doesn’t work the same way when your audience is reading your work at varying paces. Another problem I’ve noticed is that written comedy tends to lose steam as it goes along, as if the author started out with a cool idea but couldn’t maintain its execution. My fiance’s last semester of college, he took a comedy class as an elective to fill his schedule and had to read a book which he later gave to me. While amusing at first, I grew bored by the end and was unpleasantly surprised to hear the book had a sequel which I didn’t read. I’d say that the reason I’m not naming it here is because I don’t wish that boredom on another person, but I genuinely can’t remember the name and I’m not currently by my bookshelf. The point is, comedy is difficult in literature.

But this author had me actually laughing out loud at her character’s kooky adventures. And it only got more impressive when she moved to tackling books that combined serious plots with elements of humor. How hard must it be to move your readers to tears and then immediately follow it with something to make them laugh through that fiction-induced pain? As a reader, I eat that up.

So ultimately, I’m impressed with this author’s skill and wish I could gush on and on about her books, but unless I can point you to her work so you can read it for yourself, I don’t know that that’s really fair. Try some Google sleuthing maybe? I wish you luck, but in the meantime, don’t be afraid to read the books with short page counts!