Do you need a laugh? I did, and I got one.

[Still grading. Bleah.]

Providing midterm grades for so many students is always a chore — even with the help of my TA. I won’t grouse about grading today, but mention that yesterday it was getting so bad that I had to leave the Internet and my laptop grade in a place with absolutely no distractions to keep myself on task. As my mood progressively worsened, even though the stack of graded papers was finally growing, I asked myself what I could do to alleviate the mood and remembered that several weeks ago, I had downloaded a North & South spoof that Trudy told me was hilarious onto my Kindle. I’m not the most humorous gal but any port in a storm, especially when the alternative is ingestion of massive quantities of beer, which does make it impossible to grade.

I agree with Trudy that this is one of the most fantastic humorous works from our fandom that I’ve ever read. I started off thinking it was just funny and cute, but very quickly I had accumulated a bunch of belly-laughs that began to mitigate the pains of grading. The spring of the joke is that Mr. Thornton is renamed “Mr. Thorinton” and is, well, the world’s tallest dwarf. Running gags from potentially annoying moments in North & South and LOTR / The Hobbit are combined delightfully, and the author’s unerring sense for a potential pun had me gasping for breath over and over again. As someone who periodically wonders what Armitage is talking about when he mentions that a character in The Convenient Marriage has sat down on a surfer, I especially liked all the pronunciation misunderstandings between the northern and southern characters. Now, I’m sure I didn’t get all the jokes, because I’m not much of an LOTR-head, but just the North & South jokes are worth it. And the ongoing discussion of the color of fruit — well, I’ll leave it at that.

I’m not done with the book yet — as Osborne herself has said, in an interview with Maria Grazia, parody is best “savoured not scoffed” — and I’ve got a lot more grading to get through. Right now, though, I want to know:

• Will Thorinton’s “Softenings” ever be followed by a “Hardening”?
• What is going on with the Book of Grudges?
• What will Margaret do with that lemon squeezer she just bought?

I was told that this piece could be read for free on C19, but I just went ahead and bought it and I was really glad to have it on my Kindle last night and not have to rely on the Internet. At $4.99 US, it was completely worth it. Buy it via RichardArmitageNet.com and generate a donation to one of Richard Armitage’s listed charities.

Since I have only just finished chapter 10, I’m hoping that it will get me through at least one more night of grading. I see, if I run out, that Damaris Osborne is also the author of another Armitage / Spooks spoof called, appropriately, Spoofs. Maybe I should download that one now. Just in case.

[This is an unsolicited review. I purchased my own copy of the work from amazon.com. The opinions expressed in it are solely my own.]

~ by Servetus on March 4, 2013.