Evan J. Mandery

I must first admit that I was pressured to read this novel because I work as an intern for Evan Mandery's agent, and for this, I am very grateful.

Mandery is a rare writer who can write about the heaviest things in life, mortality and love and heartbreak and bone-crushing misery, without weighing the reader down. His sense of humor and inexplicable ability to pick the right words for every nuance allow the reader to feel everything the character is feeling, experience everything the character show more is feeling without the melodrama that often accompanies novels that explore these themes.

His attention to detail and use of specifics give the novel such a lifelike quality, and really, if you think about it, the experience of reading this novel is a lot like life itself: it's painful as hell, but sometimes you just have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. show less

Aliens have contacted the Earth, warning that we may be on a course for self-destruction, but the President of the United States is more concerned with the way his underwear keeps bunching up. Meanwhile, an alien physicist has calculated that the universe is about to end soon, which nobody is much concerned about at all. Also, there are alien PTA meetings, some insurance-scam car crashes, a boy-meets-girl story, and a lot of philosophizing. The author interrupts the story frequently to talk show more about himself and about what he's writing and to offer up various interesting facts, some of which are true. There's a odd obsession with raccoons, Chocodiles, and Sting (the musician). And most of the characters are, more or less, named after characters from The Simpsons.

It is, in other words, a weird, wacky mess of a book. As such, it works better than you might expect; lots of stuff that could have just felt ridiculous and annoying is at least moderately clever and funny. But it never completely clicked with me, and maybe halfway though the book, it suddenly occurred to me why. Mandery is trying very, very hard to be Kurt Vonnegut (whom he actually name-checks repeatedly throughout the book). Or something like Kurt Vonnegut mixed with a touch of Douglas Adams and doused in a sauce of pop culture references. And, well, I approve of the literary taste that displays, just as I approve of the author's musical taste. (Hey, I like Sting!) But trying to be Vonnegut is pretty much inevitably doomed to failure. I'm honestly not sure how Vonnegut managed to be Vonnegut. And Mandery, although he has enough talent to mostly keep this insanity of a novel together, just doesn't have Vonnegut's depth, or Vonnegut's bite. show less

The unlikely hero of this hilarious science fiction novel is a young Presidential aide named Ralph Bailey, whose primary duty each day is walk to the Blimpway and purchase for the President a ham and Swiss sandwich. However, in the course of this story, Ralph meets a lovely law student named Jessica, has his first encounter with aliens who are for some unknown reason presumed to be Jewish, and is appointed to be number nine hundred forty-ninth in the presidential order of succession. show more Meanwhile on Rigel-Rigel, home of the newly arrived Alien Ambassador, life goes on about the same as it does on earth, with the wife of the Ambassador to earth getting in a fender-bender, worrying about her husband being away from home, and dealing with PTA meetings. The novel continues with the first meeting between the aliens and the President.

Chapters are titled with lines of songs, and the author occasionally inserts his own commentary into the narrative, which works well in this context. This is a fun and light-hearted read, but also makes you think, just a little bit, about how ridiculous some of our human rites and assumptions are. show less

This is a funny, poignant, timetraveling, somewhat cautionary love story told over one very chameleon like lifetime. "Q' stands for Quentina Elizabeth Deveril, the passion of the protagonist's life (we never learn his name), his intended wife until he gets a visit from "a friend" who convinces him to leave her. This is only the first of several visits that cause him to dramatically change his life over and over again. I would argue that "Q" could possibly stand for "quantum physics" given show more that time travel plays a very big role in this story. But no matter the names or the nameless, this is a fascinating tale with numerous twists and turns that will keep you captivated from the first paragraph until the very last, and very gratifying, line. show less