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A review by labunnywtf
Southern Lady Code: Essays by Helen Ellis
1.0
Received via Netgalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
I love good southern humor. We bless hearts and sip sweet tea and smile sweetly as we mention that your outfit is so daring, we could never pull that off.
This is not good southern humor.
This doesn't even come close to good southern humor.
I believe Helen Ellis is probably a fantastic oral story teller. When you tell a funny story in person, you get to embellish, make hand gestures, enunciate different words. The presentation of a funny story is far more important than the story itself.
In person, maybe the story of Helen accidentally mistaking someone else's $800 coat for her own $800 coat is hysterical. But there's no umph to this story. She calls two people, confirms it's not their coat, then she and her husband go to a store to buy a $1200 coat to make her feel better about her belief that the coat she has is not her own.
This story is a lot of things, but funny isn't one of them.
Same for the story of a friend's husband's tale of a three-way he witnessed. That sounds like an amazing set up, but too much time is spent dissecting the husband's story telling method, and the wife's response to hearing the same story repeatedly.
That is not humor. It's barely story telling in itself.
The only story I enjoyed was Serious Women, wherein Helen sits in the courtroom while her friend prosecutes a woman who murdered a former high school classmate and cut her baby out, pretending it was hers.
There was no humor in this story. There wasn't supposed to be. And the story telling itself wasn't particularly good. But I kept thinking, "Damn, did someone write a book about this? Because I would read it."
Then I set this book down and started googling the news story.
This is not a good book. There's no Southern Lady Code word for that. It's just bad.
I love good southern humor. We bless hearts and sip sweet tea and smile sweetly as we mention that your outfit is so daring, we could never pull that off.
This is not good southern humor.
This doesn't even come close to good southern humor.
I believe Helen Ellis is probably a fantastic oral story teller. When you tell a funny story in person, you get to embellish, make hand gestures, enunciate different words. The presentation of a funny story is far more important than the story itself.
In person, maybe the story of Helen accidentally mistaking someone else's $800 coat for her own $800 coat is hysterical. But there's no umph to this story. She calls two people, confirms it's not their coat, then she and her husband go to a store to buy a $1200 coat to make her feel better about her belief that the coat she has is not her own.
This story is a lot of things, but funny isn't one of them.
Same for the story of a friend's husband's tale of a three-way he witnessed. That sounds like an amazing set up, but too much time is spent dissecting the husband's story telling method, and the wife's response to hearing the same story repeatedly.
That is not humor. It's barely story telling in itself.
The only story I enjoyed was Serious Women, wherein Helen sits in the courtroom while her friend prosecutes a woman who murdered a former high school classmate and cut her baby out, pretending it was hers.
There was no humor in this story. There wasn't supposed to be. And the story telling itself wasn't particularly good. But I kept thinking, "Damn, did someone write a book about this? Because I would read it."
Then I set this book down and started googling the news story.
This is not a good book. There's no Southern Lady Code word for that. It's just bad.