I am honored to announce that I have been asked to be a judge for this year's Your Laugh Line Awards! I can't wait to see what this contest has in store!
Strap in! It’s going
to be a hilarious ride!
Starting on February 1st, Your Laugh Line begins
its official search to find the funniest books written in 2017. It’s like a quest for the Holy Grail (Monty
Python or otherwise) but more important!
Our hope is that this book is so funny that it will end all war.
Okay. Maybe not.
But we are looking for the best, hilarious books written
last year.
The contest has two components. One is a Reader’s Choice
Award. Readers can log onto https://yourlaughline.com/vote and enter the author and book of their choice. The author who
receives the most reader votes will win $250 and an assortment of promotional
help from Your Laugh Line.
The other component is an adjudicated contest for books
submitted by authors and/or their publishers.
The form is available at https://yourlaughline.com/laugh-line-humorous-book-awards. The cost to enter the
competition is $20 per book. Those books will be judged by a panel of expert
book reviewers. The winning author will receive $500, plus an assortment of
promotional help from Your Laugh Line.
Authors can enter the competition between February 1st
and April 30th. Reader’s
Choice voting runs from February 2nd to August 15th. Books making it past the first round will be
announced on July 1, second round list on August 1, and the final winner on
September 1. Honorable mentions will be made for category-specific books.
Author or reader – come and help us find last year’s
funniest book!
About Your Laugh Line
Your Laugh Line was created to help funny authors find an
audience who appreciates funny books. Knowing the power of laughter to help
alleviate stress, to provide the necessary mental distraction to give the brain
a break, and to make people feel silly, Your Laugh Line is committed to making
the world a better place through humorous books.
merchant by C.S. Pacat
ot twists, a forbidden romance, and the sense that
the protagonist doesn’t know as much about her identity as she thinks she does.
This felt like something a major publisher would pick up in a heartbeat, and I
am surprised more people haven’t heard about it. If you’re a YA person, I
highly recommend this one. I’m reading book two right now and can’t wait to see
what happens! 
because it
paints the US or its allies during the war in a bad light. (Between Shades of
Gray takes place in a Siberian prison camp and this book takes place around the
maritime tragedy of the Wilhelm Gustloff.)This book was beautiful and
heartbreaking and full of history. I’ve grown to love historical fiction, because
when it is done well it tells an amazing story, but also educates me about
history in an in-depth way that might get glossed over in text books. 
eing exposed to
books by and about queer people that were published longer ago than just a
decade. These older queer books exist, but since many aren’t “mainstream” I
hadn’t known about them. I had heard of Oscar Wilde and that was pretty much
it. This book chronicles Audre’s life as a black, queer woman living in the
middle of the twentieth century talks a lot about the intersections of these
identities before the term “intersectionality” was coined. The prose is also
beautiful and I loved how the events of the book were structured. If you haven’t
read this book, I really recommend you do!
puzzle of the plot was. It had one of
those endings that I did not see coming at all, but as soon as it ended, I
looked back and realized the answer was right in front of me all along!
Christie also does some really interesting things with gender expectations that
I enjoyed.
Along with C.S Pacat, Leigh Bardugo is my other favorite
author right now. I want to be her when I grow up. Although her Six of Crows
duology is still my favorite, the ending to her Grishaverse trilogy was
amazing. Her world-building – especially her ability to draw on real life
history and mythology to create a history and mythology in her story world – is
amazing. And the characters are all amazing. I love them. I love her.
impression on me. Krygier has this magical
quality about her writing that makes things skirt between realism and magical
realism that is really beautiful. I loved how Keep Her was told through an
alternation of regular narrative and letters, also the cover is gorgeous. Keep
Her is one of those books that even though it is published by a small press and
not many people have read it, it feels like more people should have read it by
now since it is that good.
how his
story of his life was not always linear, but somehow flowed really, really
well. The main focus of his memoir are how his intersecting identities as a
person with Aspergers and bipolar depression and being trans have shaped his
life so far. Given my interest in reading and boosting Own Voices works, I knew
right away that this is a book I wanted to review for DBP and now it is one of
my top ten for the year. I highly recommend you check it out (and other books
by Dreaming Big Publications) its only about 100 pages, so it’s a quick one!
that Nick Offerman was one of the prominent ones. It is much more literary
and experimental than books I usually read – it is very metaphorical and
interweaves quoted excerpts from historical documents with the text. The end
result is a very original story that is touching and surprising.
not sell back at the end of the
term because I knew I wanted to reread it. This is a collection of poetry, but
it is so personal that it feels like a memoir. One of the most powerful things
about this collection is that, while some poems do make “sense” in a narrative
sense, many do not. But these poems do conjure up very vivid images that evoked
strong emotions in me, even though I wasn’t always sure why. I’d love to reread
it some time when I am not rushing to get it down and digested for class and to
take my time sitting with the imagery more.
of the semester, but I couldn’t work on
homework because I had to know what
happened next. I spent time putting together a playlist to listen to while I
read it and everything. 
s because I was so excited to read it in the first place. I was approved to get an advance copy from Netgalley, and this was exciting because the author is fairly well known and I had never been approved to read a book on Netgalley by a famous author before. There was also a lot of hype around the book that made me think I’d like it. When I started reading it I noticed that the main character’s name was Lucie Manette and I was like “oh, she’s named after the chick from a Tale of Two Cities,” but didn’t think much of it, since Cassandra Clare, another famous YA author, has a character named Lucie who is also named about the Dickens novel character. As I was reading, though, the plot seemed suspiciously familiar and I felt like I was in a throwback to my high school sophomore English class. I thought it was weird that a book that is so obviously a retelling of ATTC does not mention that anywhere in its promotion. It’s not even inspired by the book, it is a step by step retelling. I knew what would happen next in Tell the Wind and Fire because I remembered what happened in ATTC. It’s not that I have anything against retellings, if they are done well I love them, but the book just didn’t do anything with the original story. It was set in a futuristic, magical New York, but that setting felt like window dressing when it could have been used to add something to the original story, or relate it more to contemporary issues, or propose an alternate ending. Something. I’m sure plenty of people loved this retelling, but it just felt like it was missing something to me.
talk about a few of them. The
standout by far for me was Angels in America. It is an incredibly emotional and
weaves in so many themes about America and life in general. We also watched the
HBO series as part of the class, and seeing it performed made me love it even
more. I hope I can see it live one day.
stand out in my mind the main character, Moll Cutpurse,
stood out quite a bit. She is based on a historical woman who lived at the time
the play came out (Elizabethan England) and was known for dressing like a man
and fencing. Truly an early queer/feminist icon who needs more attention than
she gets.
that is super important
nonetheless. One of the characters is a refugee who moved to Cuba from the US seeking to escape hate
crimes against people of Chinese descent. I was also interested by the fact
that it is a novel told in verse. I have seen some verse novels out there, but
I think this was my first time reading one. I still prefer prose, but I liked
having a chance to try something new.
