You sort of expect Charles Addams-esque humor from the creator of the Its Happy Bunny series. And, in Cherise the niece by J.K. Benton (Plume Original, $!0), you get it.
Cherise is a Wednesday Addams clone of an orphan who spends the book dispatching her many aunts:
Auntie Rose loved her garden
Though Cherise despised it.
But together, one Wednesday
They both fertilized it.
The accompany line drawing is of little Cherise wielding a shovel with which to dig an environmentally-appropiate final resting place for the latest of her aunts to meet a gruesome end.
Yes, it’s probably not worth $10, but it’s a fun if minor giggle on a Friday afternoon in which it seems the best-seller list is dominated by true-life tales from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints: Escape by Carolyn Jessop and Laura Palmer, Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs by Elissa Wall with Lisa Pulitzer and When Men Became Gods: Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear and the Women Who Fought Back by Stephen Singular, which has a publication date of June 3.
Grim stuff all, although I have to give credit to Elissa Wall’s book, which I’m now reading: If Wall had any hand in the actual writing of this book, she has a future beyond the tell-all. Still, if I were picking up a nonfiction religious tragedy right now, I’d rather read Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.
