One darn good book

I just finished Caprice Crane's Stupid and Contagious and wow - great book. Most of all - very funny book. I don't often actually laugh out loud at things, but I was grinning through so many scenes. And then when Marco was proposing and she was imagining what her life would be like with him.... I was trying to get the baby to sleep, but managed to shake her awake, holding the laugh in.

The title's from a Nirvana song (Here we are now. Entertain us. Hello hello hello he-el-lo. Oh sorry.) and the fact that Kurt Cobain died at the age of 27 is very important to the lead female character, Heaven, who has decided that she will die if she's not married by 27. Though Kurt was married and it didn't help him, which the lead male character, Brady, thinks but doesn't point out to her.

The book is narrated through their points of view, starting when Brady moves into the apartment next door to Heaven's. He's a record producer with no records and she's been fired from her PR job and is always about to be fired from her waitress job. They barely get along for a while, but keep discovering more that they have in common, even though they drive each other crazy. Then she gets fired and tags along when he flies out to LA to hear a band he wants to sign and then to Seattle where he's trying to sell his idea for Cinnamilk to the CEO of Starbucks. And they get arrested.

It's hip without being poser-ish, drastically funny, and has very strong language, so my mom wouldn't like it (sorry, Mom). Most of it is the way young people talk these days, though a lot heavier on the F-bomb than I ever was. They're in New York, too, and a friend of mine from near NYC claims that she grew up launching F bombs several times in each sentence. Until we have kids and they start repeating stuff, at which point we flinch every time anything more than "golly" slips out.

I feel a bit, well, stupid reading it, because the protagonists are about a million times hipper than I ever have been. I mean, I could recognize a couple of Nirvana's songs, probably. The author is/was a writer for MTV and grew up in LA, so she's much cooler than I ever will be.

She has another novel out, so I've just requested it from the library. And if I didn't have this one from the library, I probably would keep it. I'm going to want to re-read it, so I guess I will buy it then.