Renee’ Servello’s previous book was entitled “You’re Kidding…I’m a SENIOR?”, which should give readers some pointers as to where this particular author is coming from. HUMOR ALL THE WAY is another collection of amusing anecdotes and asides wrought from the wisdom of a life well lived. Servello may be a senior but she’s aging like a fine wine and has a keen eye and a sharp tongue for the foibles and failings of those she sees around her.
HUMOR ALL THE WAY is made up of very short passages, sometimes no more than a few words. There are skits on football and baseball and television. On health and dying. Thoughts on driving and dentistry. There are no themed sections. One subject follows the next quite randomly. It’s a scatter-gun approach that, when read in sequence, might seem like an incoherent stand-up comedian’s routine. Servello’s short texts are centered on the page, with ragged line breaks as if they were poetic verse. And reading some of them as if they were poems adds weight and poignancy to the words especially in something like “Recliners”, an almost slapstick story of an elderly person’s encounter with a series of chairs, or the strangely surreal untitled piece that begins “Where are my legs?” Though most of the entries are more wryly amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, Servello can tell a good gag and, even in this written form, her timing is excellent. Her husband often bears the brunt of some of her quips, most frequently at his inability to drive to her liking, but there’s a heart-warming tenderness to many of her barbs. Even if, as recounted in an anecdote about him trying to teach her golf, he thinks he reads her like a book when she knows he must have skipped a lot of chapters.
Author Renee Servello has a keen eye for finding the comic in the everyday and the skill to deliver it in concise verse in HUMOR ALL THE WAY, an amusing and entertaining compendium of short observations on life.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader