I Married an Earthling

This is one of my all-time favorite books. When I'm feeling down it never fails to cheer me up! The Utopian planet of Zeeron was totally compelling and the Earthlings were equally delightful! Buy this book now if you know what's good for you!

At first the chapters about the Zeeronians didn't really captivate me, BUT the chapters about Chester sucked me in right away and kept me reading until I was loving *every* chapter and rooting for Norvex 7 and Chester to run off and live happily ever after together. If you were or are a goth teen, I think you'll identify and throughly enjoy this book. Even if you weren't, it's still a very entertaining read.

Orloff's campy sci-fi frolic is perfect summer reading. Norvex 7 is a professor of Earth studies on a planet known for its cosmic fabulosity, and he travels to Earth accompanied by one of the most famous hairdressers in the galaxy. He and his friends are stunned by America's bland fashion sense, and eventually come to San Francisco, where they find some relief. Norvex crosses paths with Chester, a gay goth teen with poor self-image but excellent fashion sense, and the two spark a galactic incident with their torrid affair. Like all excellent camp, this is delightfully sprinkled with smart and sassy observations on culture and life. I had some trouble at first getting into it, but it certainly drew me in as I went deeper into it.

Alvin Orloff (redactor extraordinaire of the must-read memoir The Unsinkable Bambi Lake) has crafted a surprisingly nutritive bon-bon with this spiffy book. Framed via the interlocking journal entries of two hyper-intelligent misfits (one on Earth, one not), I Married An Earthling! critiques cultural norms like ignorance, violence and predictable sit-coms with a marvelous outlook I'll call "Ethical Camp." Not content to curse the darkness, Orloff instead lights a brave lava-lamp, inspiring all of us queer-at-heart folk with visions of other worlds where Aesthetics triumph. All this and a nerd love-story too. What more could you want?