“It’s no Agent Cold Beer. It’s not even Agent Cold Beer On Assignment in Japan.
You might look at this book and figure it’s got something to do with Lincoln’s assassination. What with the dude in the stovepipe hat, the bullet screaming in from the side.
I was very prepared to mock this would-be assassin because unless Lincoln’s head was very tall and cylindrical, my money’s on that bullet passing harmlessly through his hat. But all the preparation I did, which included googling “Did Lincoln have a stupid can head?” was for nothing because this book has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln, assassination, bullets, hats, or the Civil War (for more on that, see Hinton’s other title, The Racist Time Traveler).
You might also be wondering what the subtitle means, if you can fucking read it. It says, “He’ll make an if come true.”
Here’s the scenario:
A couple is headed out for their anniversary dinner. Now that they’re empty-nesters, they can afford a nice place. The husband drives, decides to take a shortcut (OH! You men and your shortcuts and not asking for directions and being emotionally unavailable! So typical!), and gets in a head-on collision with a car. The husband lives, the wife dies.
At the funeral, a man shows up “wearing a black magician suit with a top hat with the words If in red written all over his suit.” That is punctuated the exact way it was in the book. Just so we’re following here.
He introduces himself: “Hello, my name is If, the third from the top.”
This means three things:
1. He’s third from the top. God up top, then the devil, then If.
2. We have a main character named If, which is an extremely inconvenient name for a main character, even if this book had great flow. It does not have great flow.
3. The name of the book is said in the book. This is the hallmark of a bad thing. I remember hearing Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings say that it’s a family tradition that if they’re at the movies and a character in the movie says the name of the movie, they all stand and clap. This happens less often than you’d think. They don’t say the word “Predator” in the movie Predator. Not even once. Missed opportunity. But in Demolition Man, you bet your ass.
I’m going to shorten up the book a great deal here:
The husband makes a wish because If can grant wishes for a penny. If says he has a penny fetish. We just have to ignore that for now. Just ignore.
He wishes for his wife back. He wakes up, and it’s a few days earlier, and she’s alive.
The husband is then killed in a DIFFERENT accident. Which the wife is totally fine with, and she decides to go to Hawaii and find a young man to bone down with. She falls asleep, and blammo, she’s back at the day of their anniversary, and her husband is alive.
The husband’s explanation is that he gave If two pennies, got two wishes, and that’s why he’s alive again. Now, this doesn’t actually make any sense. How did he know he was going to die on the anniversary re-do? Or did he give If the two pennies and somehow make a wish from the afterlife?
Are you as annoyed by the name “If” as I am yet?
Anyway, the wife and husband are reunited, which the wife isn’t too happy about. She then meets If, who explains the whole setup. She gives him a penny, and blammo, the husband is then standing over his wife’s grave again. The End.
Here’s what I can’t tell: Is this a joke? It seems like a joke, like the kind of joke an uncle would tell, written out in story form. Because if it’s not a joke, the wife wishing herself dead makes no sense. If it IS a joke, it doesn’t make sense either, but that’s the joke.
I paid $5 for this book. There. There’s your fuckin’ joke. “