I almost forgot to check this weekend's Download Deals at Amazon. Be sure to check out the other winners (
Project Nim,
Tim McGraw's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 and
Crysis) and to vote on
next weekend's deal.
Suburgatory, by Linda E Keenan, is $1.99 for the rest of the weekend.
Book Description
Suburgatory is a book that lampoons the absurdities and contradictions that Linda Keenan has witnessed since leaving New York City, where she was a thoroughly urban CNN news producer for seven years before settling down as a hapless stay-at-home suburban mother. The original proposal for this book was picked up by Warner Brothers in 2010, and their imagining of Suburgatory can be seen on the ABC show of the same title.
Tessa, the teenage character created by ABC’s Suburgatory, was forced by the man in her life—her dad—to leave her beloved city life for this supposed suburban utopia. Keenan followed the same trajectory, as a new mom, with no job, no friends, and not much more than a prescription for Zoloft to keep herself afloat. She found herself trapped in a place where conformity is king and where she often felt like she had been taken hostage by an adult Girl Scout troop. So Keenan decided to train her twisted reporter’s eye on the strange inhabitants of this new foreign land.
Thought of as a local town newspaper or website, Suburgatory excoriates—through satirical local “news stories” (Mom Plans School Auction During Dreary Sex; Woman Shops at Walmart to Feel “Pretty,Thin”; Dog Fed Better than Scholarship Child, Says School Nurse)—the mostly upper middle class American pieties and parenting obsessions that surround raising the perfect child amid the anxiety of an America in decline. The book uses laugh-out-loud humor to target racism, homophobia, submerged suburban sexuality, class warfare, willful ignorance, and the all-around bad behavior raging underneath the surface of those obsessively tended suburban lawns and bikini lines. Suburgatory parodies the tiger moms, breastfeeding nazis, frustrated swingers, foreskin-loving “intactivists,” barely there dads, “anti-vaxxers,” and power-mad principals.
In addition to the irreverent news stories, Suburgatory features faux op-ed “Shout Outs” (Let’s Do that Key Party Right the Next Time), witty advertisements (Briarcliff Academy—Educating the Stupid Rich Since 1903), and an over-the-top totally toxic advice columnist: Dr. Drama (“When life hands you a problem, let’s make it more interesting!”).
Death at La Fenice (
$0.99), the first title in the
Commissario Brunetti Mystery series by Donna Leon , is on sale on Kindle and from
Barnes & Noble (probably thru the end of the month, which is right around the corner).
Book Description
Beautiful and serene Venice is a city almost devoid of crime. But that is little comfort to Maestro Helmut Wellauer, a world-renowned conductor whose intermission refreshment comes one night with a little something extra in it-cyanide. For Guido Brunetti, vice-commissario of police and detective genius, finding a suspect isn't a problem; narrowing the large and unconventional group of enemies down to one is. As the suave and pithy Brunetti pieces together clues, a shocking picture of depravity and revenge emerges, leaving him torn between what is and what should be right — and questioning what the law can do, and what needs to be done.
