Book Review: Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go

"All our days are numbered.  But that number is infinity."


Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  And tonight I finished a book.  I still have a lot of books that I've been meaning to review, and we will get there.  But, today, we have Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go.


Milton and Marlo Fauster, after dying in a tragic marshmallow explosion, learn that there is more to the after-life than they thought.  Since they are not eighteen, they are darned to Heck, an after-life reform school, taught by teachers such as Richard Nixon the Ethics Teacher, Lizzie Borden the home ec teacher, Mary Mallon the biology teacher, and Blackbeard their "meta"physical education teacher, as well as Maria Von Trapp the music teacher who is actually an angel, but teaches in Heck in the interest of educational equality.  You don't have to second-guess why Marlo is sent there; she's a goth-girl kleptomaniac who has never respected authority and has no intention to start now.  But not even the principal of Heck, Bea "Elsa" Bubb, knows how Milton ended up there.  His file is pitiful, with one sticky-note of petty theft, that he didn't even know he committed.  But Milton's going to do something that no one has ever done:  he's going to bust out of Heck.

I was reading the reviews on Goodreads, and I don't think a lot of people "got it."  It's satirical and sarcastic and has a lot of allusions (note the main characters are Milton and Marlo Fauster who befriend Virgil).  Sure the story isn't plausible, and the characters are stereotypes, but that's not the point.  It is entertaining and witty and you just can't put the book down.  I would recommend the book to anyone who wants a nice, entertaining book that in someways hearkens back to the greatest satirists, but with a more modern sense of humor.

There was a lot of potty-humor.  They, after all, in Heck.  And Virgil is convinced the way out is threw the sewer system.  So, that's the down-side of the story. But I thought that there was a lot more smart-satire than potty-humor.

I give it 4 stars, because I felt that it was missing just a little something that I can't put my finger on, but it's very close to 5.

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