FROM THE DUST JACKET:
Anyone who has ever been a child will delight in this irreverent memoir of one man's family -- every sentence of which is truly funny and, funnily enough, true.
At first glance the Rhoades Clan might seem to have been normal enough. It consisted of a couple of parents, a succession of pets, and a number of children, ranging from Charley, aged five, to Uncle Harry, who seemed only a little bit older. The kids were interested in normal things: baseball, fishing, insects, stray animals, movies, and (very occasionally) the opposite s-x.
But these youngsters had a genius for inventing mischief that would have won an admiring nod from Huckleberry Finn. They carried on their semidelinquent activities in their own and their neighbors' yards, at the local A&P (scene of "The Great Hershey Bar with Almonds Swindle"), over the telephone (with its endless opportunities for brilliant, avant-garde humor), and in the local cigar store ("One pack of Sir Walter Riley cigarettes please, for my father. They're for my father.").
As part of the long, hard process known as "growing up," they learned many valuable lessons -- none of which were to be found in "Alsop's Fables." They learned how to make fermented root beer, how to get the "feel" of a pinball machine, how to treat a cat for appendicitis. They also discovered the way to make a profit on a lemonade stand: by spiking the product with vodka. Casualties: one mailman, one delivery boy, and a cop.
Every reader will recognize scenes from his errant youth in Over the Fence Is Out. It's the warmest, wittiest, most nostaglic book to come along since Robert Paul Smith went out -- and did something.
FROM THE BACK COVER:
In his hilarious hit Over the Fence Is Out Jonathan Rhoades has some unusual things to say
about dogs
"We once had a dog named Rover, which only goes to show what a sweet, naive decade the thirties were. Who would dare today to name a dog Rover? In these supersophisticated times dogs have to be named Neal, or Cadwallader's Tsetse Fly of Westport, or Susie, or Peter B. Collins Jr.... I know a family in Beverly Hills that has a dog named William and a son named Prince."
about words
"I was almost in my teens before I learned that the big hero of my childhood was not called Sir Lank-a-lot.... He battled giant ogres, which I pronounced 'orgs,' and he was kind and fair to the bedraggled underdog, even to the village eye-dot. One thing about Sir Lank-a-lot: He had plenty of red corp-suckles. And he and his whole corpse of men stuck together through all sorts of misshapes; they were untied to the end."
about sweets
"It is my own opinion that far too little scientific attention has been paid to the role of the sweet tooth in modern society. Dr. Freud talks about unfulfilled desires and the terrible frustrations of childhood, and never mentions the number-one frustration of all time: The frustration of wanting a Hershey bar and not having a nickel. The reason Dr. Freud ignored this (aside from the fact that there were no Hershey bars in Vienna) is that he wrote as an adult, and the adult, according to Rhoades' Law, has lost his interest in Hershey bars.
"What does the adult care about? You know. And so did Dr. Freud, ... If children wrote books explaining adults, there would be far more emphasis on significant things like candy and far less on s-x."