What a hot mess this book turned out to be. Based on the praise this book has received I wonder if I had a different copy.
The story in a nutshell, is about Ray who has turned into a chronic gambler, who owes everyone money, who will always make the worst decisions possible, who has been fired from his on air job at ESPN, his wife has divorced him, but Ray is sure he can win her back with the right decision. The story primarily takes place in Connecticut and Las Vegas.
I really was looking forward to this book, but sadly I ended up disappointed.
Here is a list of the problems I had with this book.
1. The story is told in 1st person. This can be difficult for inexperienced authors. There is too many times that the present day narrative stops to tell a story from the past. Oftentimes these accounts of situations that took place weren't that relevant and were seldom all that funny.
2. At times in the story, things are rather frenetic but, again this is hard to pull off. Tim Dorsey does this very well with his Serge Storms series, but in this book it just was chaotic for chaos sake. And again I didn't find the situations entertaining.
3. Instead of being funny Ray is just a pathetic gambler who bumbles along until he has to do something at which point he will always pick the worst choice.
4. I found myself skimming whole pages because nothing was actually happening. Someone should have edited this book down.
In the end for me it was a chore to finish this book.
Maybe the movie will be better.
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