Book Review #1 - The Alphabet Challenge

Welcome to the Rambling's first ever book review!  From now on, I will be posting reviews of books that I read (and I read a LOT of them) for your pleasure.  So I hope you enjoy reading these reviews and hopefully trying the good books out for yourself.  If there is a book you like which you want me to read and write up a review for, just say so.  I can't promise anything, but if I can fit it in, I will!

The Alphabet Challenge - Olga Gardner Galvin
(link to The Alphabet Challenge)
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 Brilliant! The Alphabet Challenge portrays New York City in the year 2061, at a time when political correctness and social welfare have been escalated to levels of absurdity. The U.S. Congress, supposedly locked in permanent, four-party gridlock, still manages to find the consensus to constantly add more and more federal laws protecting people from all sorts of discrimination and oppression, both real and imagined. In a world where driving without insurance will get you a slap on the wrist, but failing to recycle empty bottles or comply with zoning regulations will get you years in prison, Howell Langston Toland is trying to make a living. All he wants is to earn enough money to move with his ex-in-laws to Australia and to live a first-class life there, free of the oppressive regulation of the United States. He starts an organization called The Alphabet Challenge which promotes the equality of people whose names begin with letters in the second half of the alphabet. His attempt to scam people out of their money earns him national fame, a fight with the omnipresent corporation PeopleCare which resorts to strong-arm tactics to maintain control of the nation’s many activist groups, and an activist group of his own that he can’t seem to get rid of.

The Alphabet Challenge combines humor, potent social satire, and a very creative history of the U.S.A over the next fifty years to create a politically-charged, clever and hard-to-put-down story! This is a promising first effort by Olga Gardner Galvin, and I look forward to her future literary efforts.