Fat Jimmy and the Blind Ballerina

Title: Fat Jimmy and the Blind Ballerina

Author: Eddie Owens

Edition: Kindle Edition

Year: 2017

Pages: 445 pages

Rating: 3

+

Nobody more supportive than me. But overall, the thing I felt most was satisfaction. Fuck you all! I’d done it and I’d proved to everyone who might have doubted me, that I could do this shit.

I almost choked to death when I first received Owens's request for me to read this book and I would like to say THANK YOU for being the very first author to send me direct request.....not from galley.

There are heaps of quotes that I highlighted from this book and I'll insert them between the review. Just, pay attention okay they all are so good and funny and so clever. God, Eddie Owens literally made many references from old movie to politics and used these topics as comparison. Check these out!

"There was more chance of the Israelis abandoning the Gaza strip, than there was of me placating the drunken knobber"

or this

"When I saw that he was ignoring me, I Craig Davided it -- walked away from the situation."

my personal favorite!

"And here's the best bit, he put this junk out on tables in the garage and people bought it back for more money.

I suppose that's capitalism at work."

and this one is Fat Jimmy being random as hell.

"I made sure I stood in the middle of the pavement to make everyone walk around me. People are always getting in my way in the street, so I was just getting my own back."

Scotland is mentioned a lot in this book, and that's the first thing that intrigues me. Since most books I read are either taking place in America or England, especially London, or any other countries in Europe. But not Glasgow/Scotland. The second thing is my curiosity about the so-called Blind Ballerina.Well, I can easily talk about her, but it will spoil everything. But the explanation about her and what she actually is pretty satisfying to me. Not what I wished for, but certainly put in a very clever situation.

Anyway, have I mentioned the sarcasm on this book Freaking legend!

"Dante was just as bad. "Why didn't she play the piano? You can do that sitting down?"

What a moron he was. "Because she wouldn't be a ballerina if she was playing the piano," I told him cheekily.

Dante looked at me and smiled. "Fair point. Come here and let me congratulate you.""

Honest to death, I have never quite read something like this. Humor with this level of jokes, and basically written in heavy words with light meanings. It's all appealing to me. And the new fresh original idea makes this book worth the shot too. You can literally see the self-maintenance of Fat Jimmy and his background, His family never fails to crack me up or made me a little bit teary. It's fun and realistic in a way we probably cannot relate with, but still realistic.

"People love praise. Doesn't matter if you hate someone's guts, you'll still take their praise. It's like Holmes and Moriarty. They may be arch enemies - does that mean really camp? - But if old Moriarty tells Holmes, "You're the only one who I respect," Sherlock gets all coy and starts playing with his deerstalker. "Stop it, you."

If, however, any"one dares to criticise you, then, friend or foe, your immediate reaction is to tell them to fuck off."

There are good things, bad things, and things that simply exist in this book for me.

Starting from the bad ones: 1. Slow paced I don't normally complain about book being slow-paced. But this one is really slow. There are tons of descriptive paragraphs and dialogues. And some of them, I couldn't relate into, since I had a hard time positioning myself and catching up on the settings of this book. Maybe it's just me, because seeing another reviews, they don't seem to have the same problem as I do. 2. Too many characters The #2 reason is actually pretty much biased and subjective. I love books with many characters. That makes it seems way realer. This book, however, put characters with almost-similar pronunciation in a row. Kelly, Lenny, Jimmy . I was so confused, but when I was 100+ pages in, I could finally tell the difference. I certainly have no right to protest the author on how he wants to name his characters, because maybe each one of them has their own history hidden. That's why I said that this reason is very biased in the first place. I do have some favorite characters though, as Roger and Claudia :))

NOW THE GOOD PARTS!

1. MANY REFERENCES It's like being a Star Wars fan and see the references to the movie/characters every time I watch movies that bring up about it yet don't have anything to do with it. This book is very rich when it comes to references, and we can see that the author is very knowledgeable when it comes to detailed information like that. 2. Fat Jimmy. Fat Jimmy is a lot of thing. He is a total joker. He loves sex. He's currently on self-searching. He's hilarious and the characteristics of him strike me as something I barely see on any other protagonists. See. He's some kind of sexist and also a walking-machine of cursing. He's terrible and annoying and not good at human relationship. But that what makes him real, you know? Not that being sexist is interesting, but otherwise, having a severely flawed person as an actual character.

"I don't understand men who say they can't get talk to women. You don't have to. Give them a choice of subjects and they'll babble on like a mute that's just been cured by Jesus."

3. Plot and Ending THIS ENDING. Oh my God. Fat Jimmy is a hard worker, I must speak of this credit. He won't stop until he gets what he wants. And what he wants is not easy. To play in a comedian TV, to do something that he loves. It's not easy at all, and the author managed to do well to tell about Jimmy's journey.

4. Family trope You know that I love family tropes to death, right? This is, like, the reason I am alive. I am so glad that Jimmy has a lot of siblings and apparently he really narrates us about each members of his family and his story with them. It's so heartwarming. His mother is a soft woman and his father....Good God, the story about his father nearly tore me up! That made me feel secondhand guilt.

#3 #BookTalk