Product Description

This Might Not Be Pretty is the seventh collection of the comic strip Stone Soup. Stone Soup is a syndicated comic strip by cartoonist Jan Eliot. It appears daily in 200 newspapers in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. This Might Not Be Pretty features Jan Eliot's cartoons in full color. Stone Soup chronicles the constant chaos and misadventures of working moms Val and Joan, who also happen to be sisters. With their extended and blended families, they try their best to navigate modern life... and bring comic relief to the daily disasters we all experience. Val and Joan's two households, separated by only a fence, are a constant source of comfort and irritation to each other. The Stone family includes a middle-school diva and her tomboy little sister; a bouncing-off-the-wall three year old and a teenage boy cousin, their patient but bewildered stepdad; and an opinionated grandmother. And of course, there's a dog. Readers will see themselves or someone they know in this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #291487 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
Jan Eliot started cartooning when real life started driving her crazy. Initially published in just one alternative newspaper, Eliot gradually broadened her audience to include millions of readers. Syndicated since 1995, Stone Soup appears in 200 daily newspapers in 6 countries. Based on her own life as a divorced, working mom of two girls, Stone Soup was originally Eliot's form of therapy. As she struggled with too little money, too little time, and too little patience, Eliot chronicled the events and emotions in cartoons, and found a way to laugh at her reality. Though her daughters are now grown and raising their own families, real life continues to inspire her humor, and is the essence of Stone Soup.

Customer Reviews

One of my favorite comic strips - it's hard to wait for the next volume!
I can't remember how I first heard about the Stone Soup comic strip - it wasn't in my local paper. But however it was, I'm glad I heard about it! I bought the first book, and then the next one, and the next...

Some of the things I like about it include the fact that the kids aren't too cutesy or eerily precocious - they generally talk and act their age. The dog is a bit anthropomorphized, but not to the point of talking to humans. And although Val, the widowed mother of two girls, is the main character, all the characters are well thought out and get plenty of space and dialog.

Val's boyfriend the motorcycle cop is a continuing theme. While Val's sister married Wally next door after only a couple of years, Val and her cop aren't rushing into things; in fact, in this volume, Val and Phil don't see each other for a while. The strip ages slower than real time - unlike, say, "For Better or For Worse" where the characters' lives pretty much aged in real time, in Stone Soup, the characters have only aged somewhere between one and two years since the first volume. Some people like one kind of timeframe over the other; I like either, if it's well done, and this is. (I mean, it's certainly not Peanuts, where the kids aged only about 4 years over the whole 50+ years of the strip!)

Some of my favorite bits are the ones that take place at Val's work. Her coworkers are a mixed bunch, and allow Eliot to sneak in some characters that wouldn't otherwise fit directly into the family setting.

This volume includes the annual summer camping trip, something we get in every volume; it also includes Holly and Alix helping build a house for charity, Val buying a new car, and the middle school takeover of the new college football locker room.

It's a great family strip - not too sappy, not too moralistic, just real enough and just crazy enough.

hilarious!
This is an hilarious look at life that reflects everyday situations and attitudes. there was a depiction of each of my family members in this humor book.

Great fun
There's nothing like Stone Soup to make life not just funnier, but to be sure you know that your life could be worse!