Double planet

I have to remind myself that this book is more than thirty years old, which helps to explain the typecast nature of some of its tropes such as the all-male moon mission. The mutiny-in-space trope also pops up, as well as the disaster-movie vignette of complete strangers coming to a bad end, but nearly at the end of the book rather than towards the start as is traditional. Indeed, the pacing just feels off the whole way through the book, and for a novel which tries hard to stick to real-world physics, the way that spaceships just flit about the solar system like passenger cars undermines it all. At least it is a mercifully short book.

I’ll probably come back to this review in a year and have no recollection of the book at all.

I’ll put this up front: the dog does not die.

When a comedian gets old, they often descend into the “you can’t say anything”/“everyone gets offended” trope. One chapter of this book is this trope, almost unadulterated. It was painful to read.

The theme, that there are things that Lucy can teach the author, feels a bit contrived, and at the end Barry even gives himself a report card and admits that he hasn’t taken Lucy’s lessons on board. So what was the point of this book again?

Dave Barry’s columns, collected into book form, are some of my most cherished memories from the 1990s. Sometimes I would even emulate the structure of his humour in my own writing.

The lesson I have learned from Lessons from Lucy is that I will stick with his classic works.