I have a question for you--based on this excerpt of an Amazon review, which book do you think this person is talking about?
“Since the dawn of civilization, every major culture has spawned at least one immortal work that has withstood the erosion of time and has endured as a monument of that culture's literary heritage. Ancient Greece had the Odyssey. Rome had the Aeneid. England had Hamlet, Germany Faust, Russia War and Peace.
And for 20th-Century America, there is this book. Its sweeping tableau of modern life, its biting critique of post-capitalist materialism, and its trenchant insights into the predicament of modern man mark it as one of the greatest novels of all time.”
What do you think? Is the reviewer speaking of Hemingway, or Updike, or Burroughs, or a lost masterpiece by Fitzgerald? Well, not quite. However, if you said the reviewer was speaking of “The Lennon Sisters: The Secret of Holiday Island”, you'd be absolutely right.
Saturday night waiting for the championship match of “High School Bowl” (congrats, Calumet!) Loraine and I were joking about the show that comes right before it, Lawrence Welk. I don't know how the subject of the “lovely” Lennon Sisters, members of that show's endless cast, came up, but Loraine remembered that as a kid, she may have read what she thought was a bizarre murder mystery featuring the singing siblings. Now, why someone would actually write a a murder mystery about sisters who sang on “The Lawrence Welk Show” is beyond me, but someone did, Loraine read it as a kid, and to help her make sure that she was remembering correctly, I did an internet search for it, found out you can still buy it on Amazon, and then read what might be possibly the single best review ever written for a book.
At least the single best tongue-in-cheek book review ever written.
I have no idea who wrote the review. I have no idea if they actually ever read the book, or just decided to write the review and stick it on Amazon. But what I do know is that it may be one of the funniest things I've ever read. I'm guessing that very few people would ever search Amazon for “The Lennon Sisters: The Secret of Holiday Island”, and because of that this amazing piece of writing is just sitting there, hidden on a musty corner of the Internet. I personally never would've found if it hadn't been for the serendipity of reruns of “The Lawrence Welk Show” preceding the TV the show I host, and with me being married to a woman who actually thought she knew something about a book very few people have ever heard of.
I mean...could anyone even calculate the odds of all that ever happening?
Like I said, the review made me laugh for almost five minutes straight, and since those incalculable odds mean that most people would never even know the review exists, I wanted to share it. Maybe you'll get a laugh out of it, too.
(ps—because it's so good, here's the full review of the book--
“Since the dawn of civilization, every major culture has spawned at least one immortal work that has withstood the erosion of time and has endured as a monument of that culture's literary heritage. Ancient Greece had the Odyssey. Rome had the Aeneid. England had Hamlet, Germany Faust, Russia War and Peace.
And for 20th-Century America, there is Schroeder's "The Lennon Sisters: The Secret of Holiday Island." Its sweeping tableau of modern life, its biting critique of post-capitalist materialism, and its trenchant insights into the predicament of modern man mark it as one of the greatest novels of all time. Readers are struck dumb by the skill, compassion, and power with which Schroeder portrays the characters populating her vast canvas -- Deedee, the eldest sister, with one foot in the past and other diffidently testing the waters of modernity; Peggy, the Parsifal-like optimist, unable to comprehend the darkness that ineluctably engulfs her family as the brilliant plot speeds forward; Taggart, the brooding embodiment of a future both fascinating and awful; and Janet, the wary, wide-eyed everychild through whose neophyte eyes the reader witnesses the entire panorama. And the propulsive drama of the story, with its searing eroticism, its gripping climax, and its unforgettable denouement, assure it a permanent place in the pantheon of world literature.”
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