ID SAYS:Wait, wait, wait. Let me get this straight: The book starts with a Realtor trying to sell a house with one screwed up basement, then it introduces a guy whose son is acting French. Okay following you so far.Now it's killer dishwashers and positive reassurances for kidnappers, weird sperm donor children and American terrorists. What happened to the French kid?Halfway through the book I'm thinking, "This is Bizarro, the author's going to tie this all together somehow. It's been a wild ride and now it's going to get wilder."It gets wilder alright, but no less confusing. Next thing you know, people are seeing famous historical leaders and celebrities in burnt toast and coffee stains and a couple of pharmaceutical marketers are learning how the game is really played. Music executive mishaps, the auctioning off of James Brown's capes and their subsequent adventures and it all ends in a store at the mall selling the ultimate stress reliever...WHAT THE HECK??? I don't understand. I thought I got Bizarro but I just don't understand. On top of all this, you never find out if that sex dungeon actually sells!.........Oh..........It's a book of short stories. Okay, I get it now. Haha! Lovely.EGO SAYS:I am truly amazed at how much depth and emotional punch has been packed into these characters. I only spent an average of 5 pages with each of them and still felt I got to know them on several levels.Throughout the pages I found many different types I could connect with. The workaholic father too ingrained in his own world and neglecting his family until his son takes a sudden European turn. The always turning a negative into a positive army commander who holds on to Broadway song and dance ambitions. The play it safe type who lets loose to the extreme when he finds out he's dying. These people are me, I am them, and no matter how weird it gets, they are always attempting to adapt to their surrounding situations.If I could see any one common denominator in all of these characters, it's that they are all romantics. Whether it be physical, mental,or spiritual, they all dream of more. More than what they have and more than what they can see around them.SUPER-EGO SAYS:I don't mean to be biased, but this is my favorite of the four NBAS books. I call it so for one and one simple reason alone: Satire. This is a book that satirizes modern day society and culture the likes of which I haven't seen since D. Harlan Wilson's Psuedo-City. While his stories never get irreal like Wilson, Patrick Wensink certainly has no reservations about choking the neck of society until he sees it crap some real truths.I have to reiterate something already said by Ego, "turning a negative into a positive". This is the underlying theme to much of this book, and especially the stories that begin and end it. They are written in a sort of second person narration, with the entire text reading as dialogue being spoken to characters like they are you the reader. This creates a wholly separate kind of feeling that almost forces you to care more about what's going in the story. They both deal with hard sells, and the people doing the selling are trying exactly the same thing: to turn a negative into a positive.Mr. Wensick does this with a very likable audaciousness. He sees the hypocrisies, exaggerations and extravagances of our lives and reveals the hidden desires in us all. No one is left untouched, himself included as he even throws in a bit of self-deprecation seen in the Forward and in his own author blurb for himself on the back of the book.This is Bizarro done short, svelte and supremely sassy.