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Grace Lax Advice to Young People on Leaving Home Affirm Press, 177 pp. Source: review copy Review by Bernadette Gooden |
Is it just me? Is it just me who found this a boring, stale, trite, unfunny waste of paper?
This book purports to be a guide to "social, etiquettal, and homing tips" for young people leaving home, written by Mrs. Grace Lax, who appears to be an Edwardian society matron transported into the present day, or vice versa. It is illustrated with Edwardian prints and bound to look like a book from that period. Mrs. Lax takes us through all the topics that need to be covered, including recipes, drug use and sex. This is all presented in what is supposed to be, I'm sure, an amusing and scintillating rant full of double entendre and perverse naughtiness.
Maybe I spent too much time when I was growing up enjoying The Goons, Monty Python, The Goodies, Norman Gunston, Dame Edna, French and Saunders and Hyacinth Bucket. They have all mined similar material over the past 50 years, and they were really funny when they did it for the first time.
When I was a young teenager, my siblings and I spent many a rainy afternoon rejigging Biggles, Enid Blyton and Mum's old Girls Annuals from the 40's into orgies of double entendre, rewriting the captions under old illustrations etc. This sort of thing has been done in every university rag, previous send-ups of self help books, inspired hundreds of ranges of greeting cards and, frankly, this reviewer is over it.
The main sin of this book is that it is not funny. At the end of every page I found myself yawning a gigantic ho hum. I was going to give you a few examples of what I mean, but....hey... we're here for a good time...not a long time. If you want to make a special trip to see if I am a jaded wanker, go to a bookshop, get out the book, open it at any page, and see what you think!
Maybe it is just me.
