Love is a (bad) mix tape

Love is a mix tape was an intriguing enough title to get me to flip through a couple of chapters, but stay away from this unless you are the eternally sappy type that thinks that anything sad that ever happens has to be shared (in extensive detail) with strangers.

You only have to get a few pages into to realize that this book is written by a man whose wife died unexpectedly, but it's never made clear to me why the reader should care. Bad things happen to people every day, but that doesn't make someone's recollection of their pain literature. I could read all the obituaries that appear in the paper every day, but that doesn't mean I am expected to make an emotional connection to the person that died and those who mourn the deceased.

And I didn't find anything in the chapters I read that would make me connect with the characters. Rather, I was put off by the author's labored attempts to sound clever. Consider the following sentence "(The 90's) were a time of Kurt Cobain and Shania Twain and Taylor Dayne and Brandi Chastain." Eccccccccch! That's just plain awful writing. (And 5 of Dayne's 8 top 10 US singles peaked in the 80's the other three peaked in 1990.) Does the author want to be Chuck Klosterman, Mitch Albom, or some unholy combination of the two?

Life is too short to read crappy books. If you want to read a superlative book where someone explores the life, death, and legacy of a loved one that died suddenly, read The Boy Who Fell Out Of The Sky by Ken Dornstein.