Book Review: Boomsday

I recently finished reading Boomsday by Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking. I really liked this book, as did everyone else in Book Swap who's read it. It's political satire, but I don't think you necessarily have to love politics to enjoy the book.

I found both the plot & the characters well developed. I really liked the main character, Cassandra. She's a PR maven by day & a blogger by night. The PR campaigns she & her boss, Terry, work on are hilarious, as are the baby boomer lobbying groups. The association names alone make the book worth reading.

This book was super easy & quick to read. I loved the main character & I loved the story. Plus, all of the inside political/lobbying stuff was right up my alley. I definitely recommend this book, especially if you enjoyed Thank You for Smoking. I think now I'm going to have to go back & read more of Buckley's books, of which there are like 20.

From Entertainment Weekly:

"As might be expected from a novel by the author of Thank You for Smoking, Boomsday spares no one from the sting of satire — not the U.S. government, not the Catholic Church, not the French. Even little old-folks homes get kicked around a bit. The story takes place in a not-so-distant future in which the U.S. is engaged in six wars, the economy is ''flatter'n a pancake'' due to a $1.1 trillion deficit, and citizens under age 35 face tax hikes of 30 percent to pay for the retirement of 77 million baby boomers. For 29-year-old PR maven-cum-blogger Cassandra Devine, this last point is unacceptable. Why should she and her peers (a.k.a. ''Generation W,'' short for whatever) shoulder the burden of that ''self-indulgent, pampered'' group of ''Wrinklies''? Fed up, she devises a plan: Get opportunistic Sen. Randy Jepperson to sponsor a bill urging boomers to commit suicide — voluntarily ''transition'' themselves, in PR speak — at age 70. Soon, a bill that ''began as a turd in the Capitol Hill punch bowl'' becomes a decisive election-year issue.

There's no shortage of laughs in Boomsday, even if the jokes are not always subtle. (Cassandra’s archconservative foe hails from the Society for the Protection of Every Ribonucleic Molecule. Yes, SPERM.) But Buckley's ace storytelling trumps any shortcomings. And when you're as ticked off about the state of our country as Buckley seems to be, who has time for subtlety?"