Review: Bitter With Baggage Seeks Same

Bitter With Baggage Seeks Same
Sloane Tanen

Bitter with Baggage and the follow-up, Going For The Bronze: Still Bitter, More Baggage, are an exercise in snarky good times. Using doll-house style dioramas and the little yellow pipe-cleaner chickens people give in Easter baskets (I can only imagine what her local craft store thinks), this author creates delightful, ironic, and, yes, bitter vignettes. The cumulative effect of the books make you laugh, even if not every scene catches the reader's particular funny bone. Fans of Gary Larson's way of capturing an image's meaning with a pithy caption in The Far Side, those who enjoy Post Secret's blend of funny and painful true insights, and fans of the Bad Dog and Bad Cat books will enjoy these efforts profusely. Shoe fetishes, shopping extravaganzas, children plotting revenge on their unsuspecting parents - everything becomes fodder for the humor mill in these books.

Tanen also has a series of children's books featuring one particular, slightly neurotic chick called Coco; a maternity book - Hatched - that deals with the intricacies of pregnancy, labor, and motherhood; and her forthcoming project is geared towards teenagers: Appetite for Detention.

I give it a 4 out of 5.

Get Them:
Bitter With Baggage Seeks Same

Going For The Bronze