Author: Philippa Rice
Publisher: Andrews McMeel
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!
This graphic novel was a major disappointment for me. Usually I'm good at picking ones to review that I end-up liking, but once in a while I screw up in a big way! Soppy attracted me because of the title and the bold coloring (it turns out that the coloring - black, red white - is all there is; it’s not just the cover!), and because it was a British story, so I looked forward to a bit of homeland security as it were. I was disappointed.
Alas (and a lad) it wasn’t to be. Soppy is precisely that, but a better title might have been 'Sugary' because all this is, is a tale of two people moving-in together and experiencing exactly the same things the rest of us do. Why should I care? Normally, if you're going to tell a story like this, then you add humor, or you add insight, or you add pathos, or you add a twist and a tweak to take it out of the ordinary. Even slapstick will do it, but there's none of any of that here. It takes ordinary to extremes. In fact it's extraordinary how ordinary this is.
This is just a boring story of two perfectly ordinary people doing perfectly ordinary things. They do nothing of interest, and actually their lives are quite limited. They keep on doing the same things. They appear to have no work at all (they both apparently work from home, but do almost nothing in their job, evidently). I wish I had that "job". They also sleep for an inordinate amount of time, so we have frame after frame of them completely inert, with no dialog. Seriously? There's almost no talking at all, since there's nothing to be said about ordinary. A yawn or two maybe, but otherwise nothing of note.
This is the kind of story Nora Ephron would have told in a movie starring Tom Hanks or Billy Crystal with Meg Ryan, but that would have been amusing or quirky at least. What we have here instead is the kind of vacuous story I would have written in my teens. It’s not even a British story: it could have been any well-to-do couple in any western nation and it would have been exactly the same (except that this couple has no physical relationship to speak of, if we're to believe this story!).
I honestly got nothing out of this, and I cannot recommend it.
