Review by bobRas -- Randy Love...at your service

[bobRas]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Randy Love...at your service" by Shay Carter.]

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1 out of 4 stars

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Randy Love ...At Your Service by Shay Carter is about a young man finally having to live in the adult world, stumbling from one job, apartment or woman to the next.

This book is listed as Humor and Contemporary on Amazon; Contemporary usually means character-driven, meandering, and tension-less. All these books can usually offer is style, character and, in this case, humor.

Stylistically, this book is a bit of a mess. It is told from a third-person omniscient viewpoint. While mostly from Randy's perspective, it keeps head-hopping to other people, usually to give us thoughts the reader could have easily inferred on their own. In rare instances, the narrator speaks from first-person or addresses the reader directly for no discernible reason other than to explain the obvious. In addition, the narrative is littered with tangentially related backstories of new and old characters, right up to the last chapter. When it's not a backstory, it is a "humorous" aside that disrupts the flow of ongoing events. I noticed a few typos

Most of the characters in the book are flat and interchangeable. While this is excusable with the incidental characters Randy meets during the story, this should not be the case with his best friends, family, and girlfriend. Randy himself hardly shows any depth and his most apparent character traits (being selfish, callous, and lacking common sense and foresight) makes me not want to follow his journey to adulthood, which ends disappointing. At various points characters are described as intelligent and/or charming, but the narrative does not spend any time actually showing these traits. Whenever there might be a chance to do so, the narrator summarizes the events, as if they could not describe someone actually being charming or intelligent.

It is hard to be objective about humor, but I just cannot see anyone getting many laughs out of this one. While it did manage to get a few smiles out of me, most of the humorous situations are either outdated or cringe-inducing. I do appreciate when the supporting characters snark at Randy, though.

I rate this book 1 out of 4 stars. It reads like a first draft that was hastily edited to fix only surface elements. It was simply a chore to get through. It was neither intellectually nor emotionally stimulating and I honestly wondered why it is so long. There was so much that could have been cut and would not have been missed whatsoever.

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Randy Love...at your service
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