Sue Townsend continues Adrian Mole's hilarious antics in "Cappuccino Years". The books are published differently here in the U.S. than they are in her native U.K., so I have no idea if I'm reading them in the right order (or if my library even has them all), but I think I'm okay since this one picks up a few years after the last one. Adrian is now 30, and separated from his wife. His parents are raising his three year old son, William, and he basically doesn't have a real, paying job or a home. His stint as a celebrity chef is comical, and then he discovers he has a son from a short lived affair with Sharon Bott as a teenager. Glenn is now twelve and wants to know his dad, so he comes to live with him in the house Adrian inherited from an older man he briefly befriended (taking care of the older man's cat was part of the deal). The book takes place in 1997, and boy did the pop culture references take me back!
I also finished Caitlyn Kelly's "Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail". I was sadly disappointed by this one. After working full time in retail myself for over 5 years, I was looking forward to hearing battle stories from the front lines and commiserating with a fellow retail warrior over ridiculously rude customers and a corporate office that couldn't care less about its employees. Kelly only worked for two years one day a week for five hours at her job, so it was never a "career". She whined throughout the whole book about how she was way too experienced for the job, based on her years of work as a journalist, the many languages she spoke, the exotic locales she had traveled to. She bragged about what a good employee she was, only calling out sick a few times and only being late five times. What the hell? I was late ONCE in five years due to car trouble. I think I called out sick a total of five times in five years. She talked about how badly her feet would hurt after her shift: I was on my feet five days a week, 8 hours a day, for years, and I couldn't wear sneakers like she could, I had to wear dress shoes. I could go on and on about how I suffered, but I won't :) This is such a great topic for a book, and done correctly it could be hilarious, like "Free for All" by Don Borchet. I was hoping for more personal stories and less critiquing of the system in general.
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