they are flowers hee hee i laughed and laughed i am using no punctuation or capitals in hopes that this will prevent the tragic eating of my comment a blow to my confidence in posting here that i might never recover from were it to occur

Darling, it's a brilliant brilliant brilliant book - you *have* to read it (all that writing your thesis stuff, pah, drop it and read King Dork). Rami is working on the comment-eatingness. The ferretbrain doesn't mind basic punctuations but complicated things like ampersands and semi-colons seem to scare it. We haven't heard from you in far too long!

It does sound utterly brilliant, & very funny! By the way, comments should be fixed; do what you like with them!

Yes, yes, it's fabulous - do read it

Well, a mere 20 months later, I *did* read it, and it *was* brilliant! Occasionally I had some trouble believing the protagonist was 14 - but maybe that's just a product of my sheltered upbringing. But I loved the book as a whole and I laughed frequently throughout as well as just generally staying wrapped spellbound up in it from beginning to end... I noticed some complaints somewhere about the ending which I can sort of understand, but actually I really liked it. Portman could have gone for a cheap "lady or the tiger" type ending and just not told us anything and it would have been entirely credible, but instead he kind of offers us a choice between an explanation that does wrap everything up in a neat package (although with some hints as to the implausibility of doing so) or an explanation which says that, hey, life is random - but again, with some thought put into it so that you don't feel ripped off by... authorial flippancy or something. And I still loved the French conversation, in spite of the fact that I knew it was coming. You know he's got a new book - Andromeda Klein - coming out soon?