Whistling for the Elephants - Sandi Toksvig

As a comedian, I quite like Sandi Toksvig's brand of gentle, intelligent, occasionally surreal humour and was interested to see how this translated into a standard novel. Things start promisingly and the opening chapters made me laugh out loud several times. Toksvig's strength is not so much in traditional "joke telling", but rather in her use of language to make seemingly irrelevant or mundane things amusing. This strength is very much apparent early on. There are a number of times when she transforms perfectly ordinary situations into very funny ones through the careful use of a well-chosen word or phrase. It's this use of language - clever ...  Read the complete review