Stack of Spines

Are sequels ever as good as the original?  I loved Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy but her follow-up to her life in small town Indiana was not as entertaining as her first memoir.

I don’t usually pay attention to global ratings on GoodReads unless I’ve been in a book slump and need a sure-fire way out of it.  I did happen to glance and see that She Got Up Off the Couch was rated higher than A Girl Named Zippy, which I thought was puzzling.  It contributed to me picking up the sequel much sooner than originally anticipated.

Overall, Kimmel’s second memoir seemed to lack the childhood innocence I learned to love and crave from her in Zippy.  Though the book is titled after her mother, who literally got up off the couch (leaving her precious pork rinds), got a college degree, and lost 100 pounds, the bulk of the book’s stories surround Haven herself.  I was confused for a long time just exactly what her mother had to do with any of it.

Kimmel provides more snippets of her life and some of her brother and sister (which I did wonder about from the first book) and there were more than a few pause and re-wind laugh out loud moments in the car, but I just didn’t get such a big kick out of She Got Up Off the Couch.