Hot Summer Reads: Laugh-out-Loud Picks

Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear by Heidi LM Jacobs (NeWest Press)

If your humidity-escape plan involves an air-conditioned mall this summer, a novel set in the Largest Mall on Earth is in store for you. Whimsical and funny, Molly of the Mall is a debut novel that follows aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor who despite being named after Moll Flanders, is very much unlike a literary heroine: Molly sells shoes at a mall in Edmonton, a city she’s deemed as uninspired, and writes term papers instead of books. This one will whisk you away in an exploration of love: for language, for the wrong men (and spoiler: the right one), and for home.Nobody Cares by Anne T. Donahue (ECW Press)

You’ll find all the belly-laugh goodness of Anne T. Donahue’s razor-sharp wit and hilariously candid observations in her memoir Nobody Cares. It’s like a late night chat sesh with your BFF: it’s about screwing up, growing up, and working towards letting go of other people’s expectations of you. With essays titled “Anxiety, you lying bitch” and “It’s Called Fashion Look It Up” Nobody Cares is a funny and deeply honest highlight reel of one woman’s emotional coming of age. The Figgs by Ali Bryan (Freehand Books)

Family drama is best served with a side (or five) of humour: Ali Bryan’s novel centres on Figg-matriarch June whose dreams of retirement are dashed when the youngest of her three children unexpectedly becomes a father. With a newborn baby at home and apron string attachment at an all-time high, it looks like plans are about to change for the whole family. As Leacock Medal-winning Cassie Stocks puts it: “[The Figgs] is a soaring read with both sarcasm and soul.” The bang-on observations of family dysfunction were balanced with delightful moments of affection, and an uproariously funny spirit.A One-Handed Novel by Kim Clark (Caitlin Press)

If you knew you only had six orgasms left, how would you spend them? Fortyish and single Melanie in Kim Clark’s A One-Handed Novel is counting down her last few when she’s told by doctors that her Multiple Sclerosis is progressing father than expected and also that she can count her orgasms on pretty much one hand. This is a true laugh-out-loud novel full of sexual adventure that’ll get the heart pumping in more ways than one.It’s a Big Deal! by Dina Del Bucchia (Talonbooks)

For something a little shorter in length, but hearty on laughs, try the poetry stylings of Can(‘t)Lit treasure Dina Del Bucchia. Her newest collection It’s A Big Deal! takes aim at the BIG DEALS in our lives from politics to personal strife to Instagram to avocado toast and delivers oodles of humour and insight as it interrogates the ways in which we interpret our twenty-first-century existence. PLUS: the cover, alone. * * *Follow along this week for more #aluhotsummer reads every day on All Lit Up, and check out yesterday’s Action and Adventure picks, if you missed ’em!