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What Members Thought
Muscle Memory is unusual. Of course it's unusual. It's a Bizarro book. What kind of stupid thing is it to say that a Bizarro book is unusual? Muscle Memory is unusual in that it's strangely literary and more human than otherwise. The strangeness and the mystery come off as the mysteries of life and love and humanity. Muscle Memory is a body switching comedy. You've seen those, 80s movies where a kid and a dad undergo the old switcheroo until they both learn a lesson. Some of them like Vice Versa
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Like Freaky Friday, 18 Again, and a number of body-switching movies that the author mentions throughout the book, Muscle Memory follows characters who have been switched into each others' bodies. We all know what's supposed to happen here. After some jolly skylarking around in each others' bodies, hilarity will ensue until the two figure out what caused the mix-up and switch it back. But here's the problem: Billy just woke up feeling hormonal in his wife's body, and his own body is dead.
Sufferin ...more
Sufferin ...more
I really enjoyed this book, a lot.
This is what you get when you mix together aliens, government craziness, divine intervention with a bit of gender/animal switcharoos, and of course Terry Bradshaw. I really don't know how to describe it better than that without giving too much away.
This so isn't your average "Freaky Friday" remix. It's so much more than that and the ending was wonderfully crafted.
My only complaint was that I wish it was longer. I honestly can't wait to read more from this autho ...more
This is what you get when you mix together aliens, government craziness, divine intervention with a bit of gender/animal switcharoos, and of course Terry Bradshaw. I really don't know how to describe it better than that without giving too much away.
This so isn't your average "Freaky Friday" remix. It's so much more than that and the ending was wonderfully crafted.
My only complaint was that I wish it was longer. I honestly can't wait to read more from this autho ...more
There's a reason why movies like Big, Like Father Like Son, Vice Versa and the Freaky Fridays let magic be the cause of the switch. Because the cause is not the important or the best part. The fun, the emotion, the core of these stories is how do you face the fact that you are not you anymore, someone else is.
And Muscle Memory does a great job of taking that theme and asking ... what if NO ONE in the town (well, almost no one) is themselves anymore? And what about murder the night before? And wh ...more
And Muscle Memory does a great job of taking that theme and asking ... what if NO ONE in the town (well, almost no one) is themselves anymore? And what about murder the night before? And wh ...more
Reading the premise of Steve Lowes Muscle Memory I knew I had to have it. Who doesn’t like a good body swapping story? Honestly I had never read one before, but I have seen most of the movies that were mentioned in the book. Most people have seen the classic ones from the eighties staring the likes of Kirk Cameron, Fred Savage, and George Burns among others. But I have never seen a movie where someone changed bodies with a sheep, so I ordered Muscle Memory from Amazon. Then I waited, and waited
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Excellent book! This book is about a man (Billy) who wakes up in his wife’s body and discovers that almost everyone in the town has also switched bodies with whoever they were closest to at the time - their spouses, lovers, or even their sheep. So the cat is barking, the dog is meowing, one neighbor is a sheep and Billy and his other neighbors are trying to figure out what happened and how to fix it. There is also the not-so-minor complication that Billy’s wife poisoned him so he’s got to deal w
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You know how you hear about a book being good, and you think it can't really be THAT good? (I ran into this with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.) Okay, well, Muscle Memory falls into this category. I heard that it was good. But was it really THAT good? So I read it; and, yes, it was really THAT good. An easy five stars--although I would have given it 73 if that was an option. (And ignore the fact that Steve Lowe only gave it three stars; he doesn't know what he's talking about.)
If you've read t ...more
If you've read t ...more
Beneath the ostensibly silly plot, there are some real emotions in this book, the body switching merely the catalyst in which Billy can look at his relationship and finally ask himself, What the hell happened to us? It's short, but it's length doesn't work against it, except for when I took this book to the amusement park and the dude running the roller coaster wouldn't let it on. "Go ahead," the book told me with a smile, "I'll wait." I ended up sitting next to this fat kid who screamed like a
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I frigging loved this book.
I am a member of the Bizarro Brigade. If you aren't yet a member, and you read book's like this one and enjoy yourself while doing it, then I suggest you join up. Anyway. The reason I bring it up is because my Lieutenant (we go by military rank) is the author of this book, Mr. Steve Lowe. Earlier this very evening, I sent Mr. Lowe and email, GUSHING about how much I enjoyed this book. Seriously. I was freaking out I loved it so much. In fact, I have forced several of m ...more
I am a member of the Bizarro Brigade. If you aren't yet a member, and you read book's like this one and enjoy yourself while doing it, then I suggest you join up. Anyway. The reason I bring it up is because my Lieutenant (we go by military rank) is the author of this book, Mr. Steve Lowe. Earlier this very evening, I sent Mr. Lowe and email, GUSHING about how much I enjoyed this book. Seriously. I was freaking out I loved it so much. In fact, I have forced several of m ...more
The concept of this story is simple enough to grasp: a bunch of people wake up to find they switched bodies in the night and they need to figure out what the hell is going on. It's your standard Freaky Friday junk, pretty much.
Ok, so Steve Lowe isn't the next Shakespeare or James Joyce or whatever, but what he has in this tiny little book is, pure and simple, an entertaining story. He takes the body switching concept and makes it his own. Firstly, the main character wakes up in his wife's body a ...more
Ok, so Steve Lowe isn't the next Shakespeare or James Joyce or whatever, but what he has in this tiny little book is, pure and simple, an entertaining story. He takes the body switching concept and makes it his own. Firstly, the main character wakes up in his wife's body a ...more
A fun, well-written story. While parodic, this novella is not quite a straight-up parody of body-switching movies. Rather, it is its own unique thing--a story that explores the strange, humorous, dark, and sad possibilities of the body switching concept. Lowe does a nice job bringing his working-class characters to life through the use of colloquial dialogue. I thought the ending was a bit abrupt, but hey, there's a sequel...
An impressive debut.
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An impressive debut.
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You wake up one morning and your wife is you & you are your wife, a friend of yours is now saying "BAHHH!" How many pinches would you give yourself before knowing its a nightmare from bizarro world. Consider this the guide to that problem...A MUST READ!
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Jan 18, 2013
Emory
marked it as to-read
