A Day in Lonesome October-fest, October 3rd

Reading a Night in the Lonesome October out loud with an eight-year-old, one chapter a day

October 3rd

I wouldn't call Lonesome October a comedy. While it has funny moments, certainly, and the idea of Jack the Ripper's talking dog is an absurd premise, it's a premise played more or less straight, and I think the phrase that best describes the book is from the Publisher's Weekly review "good-humored".

That said, when I read: "They had already been out. The broom beside the rear entrance was still warm", Lily absolutely cracked up.

This wasn't written as a children's book, but Zelazny was very good about writing stories that could be appreciated on several levels,so if you missed the references to the Revenger's Tragedy in Nine Starships Waiting, you could still enjoy the work as a straight adventure story. Likewise, this is a story for adults, but it's very accessible to kids, too. (I'd put it ahead of A Dark Traveling, which was intended as a children's book) I ran it through Word's readability metrics, and it came back with a Flesch–Kincaid grade level score of 3.9. That's primarily because Snuff narrates in short, declarative sentences, as is his nature, which, almost incidentally, makes for a book that's very easy to read.

We read through the rest of the chapter, and she had no other comments.