Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays
by Mike MacDonald; Jilly Gagnon
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Pub Date Oct 18 2016 | Archive Date Nov 18 2016
Description
”Bah! Humbug! An ideal choice for holiday haters and readers who enjoy David Sedaris’s hysterically funny take, Holidays on Ice.”—Library Journal
This is the year you’re going to do it: you’re going to avoid Christmas completely!
...or you were, until your island getaway got washed out by a hurricane. Now you have to choose: should you spend the holiday with your shrewish sister and her Europhile husband, or endure your new girlfriend’s family for a week? Help chop down a tree even though it might throw out your back, or endure the icy judgment of a woman who thinks only children and pussies help bake cookies? Jet off to the glamorous slums of Kingston, Jamaica, or accept the offer of a ride from a man who never stops smiling...and is probably going to turn you into a skin suit?
From the writers who brought you the hilarious parody Choose Your Own Misery: The Office comes a second helping of misery with a festive twist. Christmas is full of fun surprises for kids, but for adults, it’s just an endless series of aggressive crowds, overwhelming credit card debt, and pretending to like the people you’re forced to spend it with.
Once you unwrap all the holiday misery hiding in these pages, the blackness of your heart will rival any lump of coal.
"I played this book thirty times and the happiest ending I got was one where I got to eat turkey with a badly burned hand. Seems about right. Hilarious every time."—Ryan North, New York Times bestselling author of Romeo And/Or Juliet
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781682303191 |
PRICE | $15.99 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley.
If you are of a certain age, you remember, most likely with fondness, those Chose Your Own Adventure books. You know where you flipped to different pages depending on what action you chose to do. (You also most likely remember games like Zork and King’s Quest where you typed in commands). Those books seemed to end most of the time with the reader being eaten by wild dogs, trapped in a sewer, imprisoned by Santa Claus. In other words, a very messy ending.
But that was part of the charm.
Something that MacDonald and Gagnon seem to realize. This is a Choose Your Adventure for the Real World. In other words that holiday that should be fun but is so loaded with everything from family drama, perfection stress, and what not – Christmas. The pair of authors not only parodies the Choose Your Own Adventure books, but also how people fuss during the holidays.
It’s not a perfect book – the basic assumption is still that the reader is straight male, but that’s part of the parody. MacDonald and Gagnon incorporate that beautiful into various jokes. Play attention to the names that they use as well.
Wonderfully funny.
If you read the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, then you are familiar with the format of this book even though it is not from the same company. Each section of text is followed by the presentation of two choices. In order to continue the plotline, you must choose one of them.
The premise, in this case, is the holidays. You are a single male who was hoping to skip the holidays this year on a tropical beach with your friend from college. But, the trip is canceled due to a hurricane. What do you do now? Where will you spend the holidays? Options vary greatly. Perhaps you will spend Christmas with your girlfriend and her family. Or maybe you will book another flight to another beach. The possibilities for the story seem endless.
This is a good, fun book. I like the interactive format. And it's well suited to the Kindle. When you click on your choice it takes you directly to the next appropriate page. The humor in it is often on the dark side. I enjoyed playing with the different choices and miserable endings. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.
Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays by Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon is due out October 18, 2016 from Diversion Publishing.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
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