The Amorous Umbrella

The Incredible Umbrella #2

by Marvin Kaye

The amorous umbrella

271 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Marvin Nathan Kaye was an American mystery, fantasy, science fiction, horror author, anthologist, and editor. He was also a magician and theater actor. Kaye was a World Fantasy Award winner and served as co-publisher and editor of Weird Tales Magazine.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impressively complex. Reminded me of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books: a person interacting with fictional characters come to life. Part 1 he’s in Fairie land, Part 2 the world of daytime soap operas, Part 3 Shakespeare. If you’re not well-educated, with good vocabulary, & remember the characters & language styles herein, you’ll be lost & miss much of the cleverness written in (as I’m sure I did). If you never studied Shakespeare, the language of Part 3 will probably be tedious in its sentence structure & vocabulary. I’m well-educated, with a good vocabulary, & did study Shakespeare in British Lit. in high school, & still I had to look some words up & reread some sentences & conversations to understand what they were saying (& a couple times just gave up & moved on). (Keep your phone close by!) That sometimes wasn’t enough to grasp a Shakespearean sentence tho. I feel like this book would be much better appreciated if read with a teacher to explain & bring out the nuances & cleverness. This is a sequel; the first was “The Incredible Umbrella”; I was going to read that first, but only one library in the state had a copy, & it seems it got lost in the mail enroute to my library, & I no longer care.

[Priscilla King · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Fillmore, owner of a big umbrella that's actually an Interdimensional Transfer Engine that takes him to the fictive planets where his favorite works of fiction happened, has abandoned his mundane life and decided to look for True Love in romantic fiction. With his new friend Boris (the Frankenstein Monster) he explores Shakespeare's dramas, soap operas, fairy tales, and eventually realizes that in each world they visit he keeps meeting women who look as if they'd be played by the same actress in the movie version. He favors that physical type. However, it's obvious that the author hadn't run out of ideas for Umbrella stories yet...so at the end, his friends on the world of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas sing a happy song per G-&-S-world tradition: "Each of us will wed the other, nobody be Fillmore's Bride."

I knew there ought to be a third volume to this series, and I'm delighted to see that now there are four.

[Josephine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't like this quite as much as the predecessor; once the Reveal's been made, the sequel had better come up with something more thrilling...and this doesn't quite live up to the first book, though it's amusing to see Fillmore/Phillimore try to squirm out of the various entrapments the women he meets present him.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange little book. It wasn't really for me but I did very much respect what Kaye was doing and the brilliance of his creation. He really knows his subject matter and employs it very creatively. He generally spends time in three worlds: a fairy tale world, a soap opera world, and a Shakespeare world. Oddly, I enjoyed the soap opera section the most.