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Lazy Susan
This could be the best or the worst weekend of Susie Q. Martin's life.
Come on a night out with one of the most original voices you'll encounter in literature this year - a working-class, Scottish Holly Golightly for the influencer generation - as she navigates 48 hours of parties, drugs, sexism and really expensive bevvy.
She's going to need your help.
Come on a night out with one of the most original voices you'll encounter in literature this year - a working-class, Scottish Holly Golightly for the influencer generation - as she navigates 48 hours of parties, drugs, sexism and really expensive bevvy.
She's going to need your help.
152 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2020
1 person is currently reading
36 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 29, 2025
Meni je bilo zabavno da biram kuda će priča da me vodi (mada sam pročitala sve opcije) i eto, sviđa mi se to i da razmišljam kuda su me sve moje odluke odvele i kako žive druge ja u paralelnim univerzumima sa drugim izborima! 5⭐️ Suzi, ličino stara!
January 26, 2021
Can't work out of I've finished the book or not as there are multiple endings! I loved choose your own adventure books as a child but must admit the world this one's set in probably wasn't for me although it was a nice break from the books I tend to read. A wee quickie and worth the time.
August 14, 2024
Susan Q. Martin is a streetwise Gen Z woman with a social media following in the four digits (a fact she's quite proud of). The book opens with her enjoying a buffet of club drugs with a man who already has a girlfriend. But Susan is adamant about not doing him any sexual favors in return for all this illicit abundance.
We then leave him and follow Susan on a heady weekend in Edinburgh during the city's festival season.
What makes this book really fun is that it's choose-your-own-adventure. I know Alan Bissett didn't invent the idea, but I'm obsessed and would like to see more of it in adult fiction! I mean, why not?
From the first pages though, I was waiting to see whether the author would penetrate Susan's various defenses (vanity and a chilly cynicism among them) so that we might learn more about the more vulnerable aspects of her character. And he did, in more ways than I ever could have predicted.
I'd assumed at the start of this book that Susan was meant to be an "empowering" female. But I'll admit that for most of the story I just saw her as a little girl with her armor strapped on too tightly, trying to win at a man's game.
But neither view of her is that simple because our idea of who Susan is changes depending on which future we choose for her. Thanks to the way this book is set up, we get to decide who Susan becomes as the story unfolds, based on whether she recognizes her own power or not.
And isn’t it like that for all of us? Wouldn’t we all be different people had we made a different choice in that split-second it was given to us?
We will never be able to see the many lives that we could have lead had all those split-second decisions been different. But we can see it the ways this character’s destiny tree-branches based on her free will—on our free will for her! And that makes me stupidly excited about the possibilities in story-telling.
I admired Susan, but at times I also felt sorry for her. Or rather, I felt sorry for all the young people today who are forced to navigate this deformed landscape of dating apps and hookup culture. We live in a time when any semblance of accountability between people is unreliable at best and ruthlessly non-existent at worst, when people get into “situations” instead of relationships, like the “on and off thing” Susan has with the rapper Mad Dealership.
But Susan is no wallflower. She meets these times with guts and glamour, even if some of her ideas about how to garner female power are limited.
But what makes this novella really shine for me is Alan Bissett's incredible command of voice. The Scottish phonetic spelling is easy to adjust to if you've heard a central belt accent before. But once you get that accent in your ears, it feels a lot more intuitive than the regular spelling.
Lazy Susan is worth a read if you're ready for all the scrappy glory that is being a party girl in 2020's Scotland. I enjoyed the exciting ways that Alan Bissett plays with story structure and how he makes use of space on the page to shape Susan's memorable voice. It's like reading performance art, almost. I'm a fan.
We then leave him and follow Susan on a heady weekend in Edinburgh during the city's festival season.
What makes this book really fun is that it's choose-your-own-adventure. I know Alan Bissett didn't invent the idea, but I'm obsessed and would like to see more of it in adult fiction! I mean, why not?
From the first pages though, I was waiting to see whether the author would penetrate Susan's various defenses (vanity and a chilly cynicism among them) so that we might learn more about the more vulnerable aspects of her character. And he did, in more ways than I ever could have predicted.
I'd assumed at the start of this book that Susan was meant to be an "empowering" female. But I'll admit that for most of the story I just saw her as a little girl with her armor strapped on too tightly, trying to win at a man's game.
But neither view of her is that simple because our idea of who Susan is changes depending on which future we choose for her. Thanks to the way this book is set up, we get to decide who Susan becomes as the story unfolds, based on whether she recognizes her own power or not.
And isn’t it like that for all of us? Wouldn’t we all be different people had we made a different choice in that split-second it was given to us?
We will never be able to see the many lives that we could have lead had all those split-second decisions been different. But we can see it the ways this character’s destiny tree-branches based on her free will—on our free will for her! And that makes me stupidly excited about the possibilities in story-telling.
I admired Susan, but at times I also felt sorry for her. Or rather, I felt sorry for all the young people today who are forced to navigate this deformed landscape of dating apps and hookup culture. We live in a time when any semblance of accountability between people is unreliable at best and ruthlessly non-existent at worst, when people get into “situations” instead of relationships, like the “on and off thing” Susan has with the rapper Mad Dealership.
But Susan is no wallflower. She meets these times with guts and glamour, even if some of her ideas about how to garner female power are limited.
But what makes this novella really shine for me is Alan Bissett's incredible command of voice. The Scottish phonetic spelling is easy to adjust to if you've heard a central belt accent before. But once you get that accent in your ears, it feels a lot more intuitive than the regular spelling.
Lazy Susan is worth a read if you're ready for all the scrappy glory that is being a party girl in 2020's Scotland. I enjoyed the exciting ways that Alan Bissett plays with story structure and how he makes use of space on the page to shape Susan's memorable voice. It's like reading performance art, almost. I'm a fan.
January 4, 2021
Choose your own adventure for grown-ups. Susie is sound. If you too are desperate for another Alan Bissett novel, this is the perfect snack to tide you over.
February 19, 2021
A clever and unusual wee novella. I had never read a book with options before. I'm glad I chose the ones I did.
March 20, 2021
Absolutely loved it! Tempted to go straight back in but think I'll put it aside for another ride some other afternoon. Total fun. Can't wait to get back to the Fringe now!
October 14, 2021
I'll be honest, I didn't really read this as intended. I didn't want to miss anything!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews