CPR for Dummies

by Mickey Z.

Open to any page in CPR for Dummies and you just may read a line like He's a priest; of course he hesitated when he realized he was about to hit someone with a crucifix. OR I needed to believe someone higher than the government was in charge of things so I went to church. OR "We are here to, like, honor your loins and everything," said Ruth. The world is creeping towards destruction--no, not theoretically--it's really happening. In these last hours will humanity come together to correct their collective wrongs? Or will there be rampant beatings and kinky sex? A group of strangers are brought together by synchronicity to answer the age-old you lookin' at me, punk? The answer entails the comeuppance of the rich, police brutality, aerobic instruction by the Messiah, sexual slavery, and mutating genes. (Is this sounding good? I hope so. It's not easy writing these. I'm just a corporate monkey trying to snag your hard-earned dollars but don't let that get in the way of buying this book. Did I mention SEX yet?) Author Mickey Z's experimental tour-de-force is a funny, challenging deconstruction of the concept of the "novel" as well as life in the United States of America.

Genres: Bizarro Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2008

About the author

Mickey Z. is probably the only person on the planet to have appeared in both a karate flick with Billy Blanks and a political book with Noam Chomsky.

Reviews

[Kat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Janie, a girl who works for a magazine called Naughty and is a bit obsessed with sex, finds herself in a predicament when she walks into a church to get directions on her way to an audition and instead, finds a small group of religious fanatics who think she's the second coming of Christ. Led by Father Gil, a less-than-holy priest, this eccentric bunch will not allow her to leave, continue to call her J.C., and ask her all sorts of outrageous questions. Janie's answer...to lead them into the arms of sin. Oh, and let's not forget to mention that the world is about to end while all this is going on.

The positives: I like the characters, while ridiculous and somewhat far-fetched. Not much character development, but the story is so short (the span of a few hours, that it doesn't lend itself to that). The plot, while meager, was interesting and comical. I also enjoyed some of the political rhetoric in the book, especially toward to the end.

The negatives: Had the author solely focused on the story at hand and left out all the snippets of history, politics, unrelated side stories, unnecessary tests, etc...this book would have been the size of a pamphlet. I got REALLY sick and tired of the constant cutting away from the story. The author's personal interjections in parentheses, while whimsical at the beginning, got severely old and annoying after about page 10. It felt like the author was trying way too hard to be witty, but really it just came off as bad writing. There was far too much unrelated information that didn't seem to matter one way or the other to anything that happened in the story. I won't say that some of the side notes didn't relate indirectly, but at least 75% should have been removed.

Overall, I felt that this was ok at best. I wouldn't tell some one not to read it, but I wouldn't recommend it either. The potential is there, but the author missed the opportunity on this one.

[Christy Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to rate because the story is a 1 but the style is a 5. Let's call it a 3.

Mickey Z wrote the book in a really fun way; interactive with varying styles. The parts I liked the best were the personality tests.

Alas, the story itself is just boring, as are the characters.

Mr. Z just needs the right story and he can do something amazing.