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Title: On Social Anxiety
Review: I had the unfortunate obligation of reading this novel for a class. The characters feel like caricatures fumbling around each other with never the right words for the situation they find themselves in. Most of the book is composed of awkward dialogue, with the characters either being too polite or too aggressive. Yes, Smith is trying to convey how different people of different backgrounds clash yet still try to get along, but for the reader's sake, it would have been nice to have a little more flow to the book. The book should have been titled _On Social Anxiety: When People Who Are Different Interact_, because that is its major theme. The thing is, we don't need a reminder of how different we all are. We're living that every day. We don't need to read a novel to realize that.Lastly, I don't know what all those positive newspaper reviews were reading, but this book was not funny -- at all. I didn't laugh a single time.
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