She Got Up Off the Couch

I loved this book just as much as I did the first.  You know those books that you try to savor by reading each and every word, gently caressing each page as you turn it and seeing how long you can possibly read it?  This was one of those rare gems.

This memoir by Haven Kimmel is told with particular attention to Zippy's mother, a formerly deeply depressed woman who spent her life on the couch with pork rinds and science fiction.  Her mother, Delonda, finally gets off the couch and gets a degree in English, before becoming an English professor herself.  There are still the occasional mentions of Zippy's father, who was a star character in the first book, but Zippy's mother is the main focus of the book.

She Got Up Off the Couch is written with the same child's voice that Kimmel used in the first book.  I think that brilliant style of writing is even more apparent as you can hear Zippy's voice change as she grows up.  The tone is still that unmistakable child interpreting events voice, but the tone is different from the first books.  There is a new awareness.  Kimmel mentions realizing that, oh yeah, she only ever got a bath when she was at her friends' houses and the dawning realization that not everybody lives in a tenement house and has a gambling father.

The book's tone has a slightly more serious, growing-up tone to it, but it is still laugh-out-loud funny in many parts.  The same uproarious games with friends, colorful characters in the small town, and strange-but-true events are present here that were in the first one.

When you pick up a sequel to an adored book, there's always this fear that the second one won't quite match up to the first, that nothing can even try to compete.  But Haven Kimmel has created a second book as memorable as her first.  Please, please, please go and buy this book and read it and then come back and tell me I was right.




(I'm adding the amazon associates link this week because this is a book that I really, really think everybody should read this.)