Fiction Book Reviews

Book Review: Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float

By Sandy Amazeen Sep 29, 2009, 16:29 GMT

In the bestselling tradition of Stuff White People Like and I Can Has Cheezburger?, the next online humor sensation makes the leap to book form When humorist Sarah Schmelling transformed Hamlet into a Facebook news feed, it launched the next big humor trend-Facebook lit. This hilarious book is the first to bring more than fifty authors and stories from classic literature back to life and online. Schmelling uses the conventions ...more

What do you get when you cross the latest social networking technology with authors and characters of classic literature? Well in Schmelling’s case, you get laugh-out-loud hilarity as figures like Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allen Poe bitch, coerce and attempt to outwit one another while characters like Scrooge repeatedly reject friend requests. Adroit humor pulls these figures kicking and screaming (for mercy) into the twenty-first century with updated versions of time honored storylines as witnessed when Romeo fails to read up on the latest from Friar Lawrence. Cerebral comedy doesn’t come much better then this but be forewarned, reading this might cause you to start dusting off and revisiting some of those time honored classics.