To Blurb or Not to Blurb

From the dust jacket of this week's bestseller:

One of the greatest novels of the past year, the author must be commended for his approach to the epic story of a boy, a girl and a sandwich during the Great War! - P. P. Simoleon, The Picayune Gazette

Please pass this around in all of your reading groups, book clubs, late-night talks about where the novel is heading. Any novelist that can make you care about the texture of a properly prepared sandwich during the Dardenelles campaign should be commended. - Dr. W. Q Xianthippe, The Hardness Quarterly

And now we come to a book about a boy and his amorous adventures with a sandwich in the trenches of France and Belgium. The author must be thanked for the accuracy of his recipes and readers are advised to try and recreate them at home (I hope you have plenty of pastrami!) - Flora Estelle, Food for Thinking Monthly

I remember the worst battles of Vietnam and Grenada, and I can understand the author's deep understanding of the importance of both orgasms between bombing runs; sandwiches after scouting raids. - Professor Arthur Mellon Glascue Minto Bellingham, Jr., University of Listerville

What an incredible ride! I think that anyone who finds the study of history boring should take a look at this incredible story of bread, battles, girls and boys, sex and salami, trenches and taste tests. A wonderful tale sandwiched - see what I did there? - between the worst moments in history. - R.C. Howler Monk, Taste of the Ages Magazine

It would seem to be quite churlish to disapprove of a novel that creates its own quixotic momentum during a moment in human history when the worst aspects of man became beast on the battlefields of Belgium and France. The authorial intent here seems to be to provide us with a gastronomically gallant tale of a young and rather naive young lad caught between orders that only create more death and drama while his heart pines for a comely lass who does not serve as a figure from his home country but one who instead is in enemy territory. Love has no bounds, and neither does the novel when it explores the sandwich-making skills of a soldier who would do better to step out of his uniform of combat and instead find a chef with a possible... (continued on inside flap). - Horace H.B.H. Beauregard, The Rightside Reveille Reader

Well, it was different. Glad that it fell into my lap and that I could finish over the space of a weekend. Will not look at my lunch in the same way ever again. - John Jacob Jingleheimlich, Nobel Laureate, 2025

Why didn't I think of this? - Jamie Oliver

If you seriously think that we are going to give you a blurb about some nonsense tome about a boy making sandwiches during a war and using them as some sort of aphrodisiac - or even worse - when he manages to betray his country with a too-willing girl, you've got another thing coming! - Editors of Modern Edition of The Joy of Cooking

We see this as a bold and daring novel that wishes to tell a story that had been ignored for too long. We applaud the tale of a boy, a sandwich and a girl, and hope that this is the beginning of a series of novels about those untouched areas of the human narrative. - Statement released by the Prix Dante Melville Boethius Flaubert Committee on the awarding of First Novel of Combined Intent by an Author of Dubious Distinction Prize

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