Tag: Humor

Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Dear Monica Lewinsky asks who really owns temptation

Mandy Webster

Julia Langbein’s sharp, irreverent novel reclaims female desire from the shame imposed upon it.

Some novels arrive with a premise so startlingly original that you immediately lean closer. Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein is one of them—a novel that is at once profound and wickedly irreverent, using the ghost of Monica Lewinsky as both witness and guide in an excavation of female desire, shame, memory, and blame. Set for release on April 14, 2026, this is a book that refuses easy moral judgments. Instead, it asks a more difficult and necessary question: when women are punished for desire, whose sin is it really?

Get your copy of Dear Monica Lewinsky from my independent online bookstore today!

Forty-year-old Jean Dornan has never truly escaped the summer of 1998. While studying abroad in France as a college student, she entered into an affair with her much older professor, David—a married man and a figure of institutional authority. When he reappears decades later with an invitation to his retirement celebration, Jean is forced back into the emotional wreckage of that summer. What follows is not merely a reckoning with memory, but a confrontation with the story she has been telling herself for years.

Continue reading “Dear Monica Lewinsky asks who really owns temptation” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Pam Kowalski is a Monster! by Sarah Langan — When memory lies and the world unravels

Mandy Webster

There’s something deliciously unsettling about realizing your memories might be wrong. Sarah Langan’s Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! turns that unease into a full-blown psychological and supernatural meltdown. This novella barrels through themes of memory, trauma, and rivalry with the manic energy of an apocalypse that might already be happening — or might only be in the mind of its unraveling narrator.

Get your copy of Pam Kowolski is a Monster! from my independent online bookstore today!

Janet Chow’s life didn’t exactly pan out the way her classmates might have predicted back at Sewanhaka High. Once destined for greatness, she’s now middle-aged, adrift, and licking the wounds of a career in journalism that has long since crashed and burned. Then she spots her old nemesis — Pam Kowolski, the girl she used to despise — who has somehow transformed into “Madame Pamela,” America’s psychic sweetheart and doomsday influencer. Pam is rich, beautiful, and adored, while Janet is invisible. Convinced that Pam’s fame is built on lies, Janet sets out to expose her as a fraud. But digging into Pam’s past also means unearthing the pieces of her own history that she’s conveniently buried — and the deeper she digs, the more she starts to question what’s real, what’s remembered, and what’s imagined.

Continue reading “Pam Kowalski is a Monster! by Sarah Langan — When memory lies and the world unravels” →
Book Reviews, Uncategorized

Response to “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal”

Mandy Webster

The front cover of Lamb: The Gospel According ...
The front cover of Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood PalISBN-10: 0380813815 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m in the process of editing my “Papers” project that I am planning to publish here in a few weeks, and I keep stumbling across book reviews and other pieces that I think will also make interesting blog posts. This morning, I came across this reader response I wrote for one of my favorite books that I have ever read for school and thought I would share it with you. Here’s a throw-back Thursday review of a book that I read in the spring of 2011.

Response to “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal”

After thousands of years, the mystery of Christ’s whereabouts from the time he was 12 until the age of 30 has been solved. Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, is Biff’s often hysterical account of the life of Christ during this oft-debated period. Throughout this novel, Moore explores such deep theological questions as the divinity of Christ and free will, using modern language sometimes reminiscent of a contemporary television sitcom. Moore manages to integrate a high level of intellectual humor throughout most of the novel. For me, Lamb has earned the cliché, “laugh out loud.” In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Biff himself had coined the phrase to begin with.

I’m not normally one to cry or laugh out loud when reading any book, but the sarcasm and irreverence used to create humor throughout Lamb definitely had me going. For example, when Joseph asks Biff if he wants to become a stonecutter, Biff replies, Continue reading “Response to “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal”” →

Editing, Publishing

If my cat had thumbs

Mandy Webster

picture of sleeping cats
These lazy bums think they’re ready to write a novel. Is it wrong that I was tempted to draw chalk outlines around them as they slept?

Have you ever wondered how difficult it might be to self-publish your novel? Let me tell you, it’s pretty easy. If my cat had thumbs, she could throw a sheath of paper on the floor, slather the pages with her paws prints, and call it a first draft. She could scan those sheets of paper into a digital file and organize them into the order of her preference, thus completing draft number two.

Do you hear something? I do believe that is the sound of cat lovers everywhere breathing a collective sigh of excitement over the announcement of Zelda Cat’s latest novel. Wait. Zelda would never truck with such nonsense. We’ll get Lulu to do it.

If my cat had thumbs, she might then upload her masterpiece to a website like Create Space, list it on Amazon, and call it published. Luckily, my cat doesn’t need thumbs to curl up on the windowsill and wait for her money to start pouring it in. Continue reading “If my cat had thumbs” →