My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

Money. When you have it, you don’t think about it, and when you don’t, it’s all you think about. Unless you’re me: Captain Denial of the good ship Penniless.

 

The walls are adorned with the usual “I’m really qualified” certificates, along with oil paintings depicting calm scenes of shorelines, sunsets, and gardens. The color of the room is soothing. I suspect it has some pretentious name like “Coffee Breath” or “Buffalo Turd at Sunset.” I guess if they just called it “Brown,” they wouldn’t be able to charge as much.

 

It’s just that I’m taking particle physics and applying it to hair ribbons. I’m struggling with my professional credibility and twenty years of dogma here. If you ever tell anyone about this conversation, I’ll kill you.

My Review:

 

I rarely read this genre, as in never, but I was intrigued by the synopsis while also feeling the need for a drastic change-up and due for a jackpot – bingo! I’ve struck gold, as this was an unexpected treasure chest of believable oddity that persistently taunted and poked at my curiosity while squeezing my heart.

 

The well-crafted storylines and agile writing style were engagingly emotive and deceptively evocative, yet despite the bit of imaginative world-building required, it is easy to follow and highly absorbing. I may have done a bit of time traveling myself as I fell right into Mr. Jones’s clever arrangements of words and was lost in Joe’s story for hours before looking up. I vastly enjoy witty snark and the main character of Joe was assembled with a heaping helping. And while it wasn’t a cliffhanger, there is obviously more to come and I will be eagerly awaiting Mr. Bridgeman’s return.

 

As a bonus, I scored a new addition to my Brit Words and Phrases list with lovely jubbly, which Mr. Google indicated is an exclamation of joy or delight to good news, which is an apt expression of how I felt about stumbling upon this peculiarly compelling tale, it was indeed lovely jubbly.