Bad Girls and Other Perils: Book Review

By Elli Davis, August 26, 2011

Bad Girl and Other Perils Cover

A columnist for the Toronto Sun is not the first person you might think would write humourous stories, but Mike Strobel’s Bad Girls and Other Perils provides some "cheap" entertainment. This is not a putdown, either — there is a time when a guffaw at a tawdry short story can be good!

The stories go for quick, easy humour whenever they can; Strobel is certainly no Stuart McLean imitator. He enjoys experimenting with his perception of the world, poking and prodding here and there to see what happens. His instruments are the (mostly) funny characters promised by the blurb, and a bit of fetishism.

Sometimes this comes at the price of any real enjoyment of a story rather than memorability. Case in point: “Give Him an Inch, He’ll Take a Smile,” a story about penis enlargement, is not vulgar, but it could have been so much better. It goes for all the easy jokes. You will be treated to such tongue-in-cheek tips as where to go for sex in Toronto and how not to end up nude on the Internet.

If I had to categorize it, I would call it the kind of book women call "a man’s book.” At any rate, it is entertaining enough, it is bite-size, and it has its place — namely, beside the toilet.

Bad Girls and Other Perils Details:

• Mike Strobel
• 188 pages, paperback
• List price: $19.99
• Available at Amazon (online price at $14.43) and Chapters (online price at $15.19)
• ISBN-10: 1554887860
  ISBN-13: 978-1554887866

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