There are plenty of arch asides that parents will enjoy in this droll little book, which shows that it may be the stars who shine, but it's those who provide the behind-the-scenes technical support and organizational know-how who actually put the show together.
"The story line is droll, but the book is also tough, sad and surprisingly sweet," Jennifer Reese said here last year.
In a droll, overstated new book, "Against Love: A Polemic" (Pantheon; $24), Laura Kipnis describes a different kind of marital conversation.
Eric Comstock, singer, pianist, aesthetic heir of Bobby Short and droll walking reference book of traditional American pop-jazz, was the brains behind the successful Off Broadway revue "Our Sinatra".
Along the way you garner a motley and entertaining assortment of fellow travelers: a foulmouthed, lingerie-clad hermaphrodite named Kainé; a droll, arrogant floating book named Grimoire Weiss who calls Kainé "hussy" at every turn; and a boy named Emil, who leavens Weiss's cynicism and Kainé's anger with a touching (though never quite cloying) earnestness.
Omarsdottir's human characters are less committed to one another than they are to the state of limbo they inhabit, and if the dialogue between them becomes a little too similar to the conversation Billie invents for her dolls, that's a tendency this daringly droll, wholly perturbing book makes it easy to excuse.
Only Penguin's droll adult Ladybird books (65, 87), written by Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, were something new and successful in 2015 driven by male authors.
The book's droll, mock-tall-tale tone soon grates: it isn't clear whether Crace wants us to feel sympathy for his characters or laugh at them as fools who have brought their collective doom upon themselves.
"I can conceive of a man saying it would be droll to write a book in that manner," he continued, "but have no notion of his persevering in executing it".
Neatly written, droll, rarely revealing, the book had one passage that stood out a mile: Parton giving a commencement address to students at the University of Tennessee and being struck by sudden thoughts of the children she'd never had.
