The Pig Comes to Dinner

By: Joseph Caldwell / Narrated By: Chris Patton

Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins

Fun, but can’t hold a candle to the first in the series!

And so I began the listen of The Pig Comes to Dinner holding my breath. I did sooooo LOVE The Pig Did It (To the point of naming it my Favorite Humor audiobook of 2020!)—would the writing style, the characters, be as hiLARious in this book?

To be honest, I already started off the listen with a bit of a cringe. The main character for this story isn’t American-born Aaron McCloud but is his aunt Kitty McCloud. Tho’ I did so love her, I have to admit that Aaron just cracked me up sooooo much before, and I’d been looking forward to listening to a furthering of a tale of him floundering in Ireland. I mean, the guy took himself waaay too seriously, plus he had a tendency of getting dead drunk at inopportune times… I found that vastly enjoyable. Still, Kitty, with her verbose ways, and with her headstrong personality? Uhm, okay, I guess so; I’ll stay with ya author Joseph Caldwell.

Well, right away Aaron and Lolly are relegated to verrrrrry secondary character status—they bring the Pig over to Kitty and new husband Kieran, much to that couple’s dismay, esPECially Kitty’s, and then they depart, barely coming into the story again towards the end.

What this story amounts to is that Kitty, doing well with her revisions of classic literature (In Jane Eyre, Kitty has Jane rebuffing Rochester and healing his mad wife through kindness… as any right-minded woman would!), has used some of her funds to buy an old castle for the newlywed couple’s abode. It’s an ancient place, and Kieran’s cows are kept in the great hall, as they would’ve been in the days of old, and it turns out that the Pig might have the run of it also… after Kitty discovers one thing about this special Pig…

Turns out? Like Kitty, like Kieran, the Pig can see the castle’s two resident ghosts: Taddy and Brid, a young man, young woman who were both hanged as examples over two hundred years ago.

Then the story is about trying to get rid of them, then coming to kinda sorta like them, then wanting to set them free—esPECially when one Lord Shaftoe turns up, papers in hand, litigation in motion, saying he’s the rightful descendant and owner of the castle. This is what makes this story less whimsical than the first book: There’s a LOT of history of English atrocities to the Irish dwellers of the land. And Kitty takes this all very seriously.

But the writing >phew< saves it all from becoming a slog as once again, this is HIGHly overwritten (MUCH to my delight!). These people are Irish, through and through, and wax poetic, wax oh sooo lengthily over anything they want to say. Further, Caldwell just has a wry way of looking at the world, and he has his characters sporting so many quirks and flighty tendencies that I was chuckling quite a bit… tho’ nowhere neeear as much as I did with that first heavenly outing.

One thing also is that Chris Patton returns for the narration. It kiiiiinda doesn’t make sense cuz no longer are we with an American hero, so the American narration is a trifle off. But, dude! Patton just throws himself into his performance, wrangling such accents, juggling characters as they bark and quibble back and forth, delivering action and drama! drama! DRAMA! as these folks get into emotional scrape after emotional scrape. Wonderful to listen to Patton’s return for this second book.

Which brings us to this: Seeing as this wasn’t what I’d hoped for, and seeing as the ending is oh SO disheartening to me… WILL I get the third and final installment of the series? Costs a whole credit for a short listen, no Kindle Unlimited to save me a few bucks on a Whispersync purchase. I’m questioning cuz once again, it ain’t the melodramatic Aaron as main character, but is Kitty, and there IS the unfortunate ending. So to be honest? I really don’t know.

But I do have to tell you: Joseph Caldwell’s writing is soooo good, soooo over the top, sticking then moving then flowing back and forth and rolling into the waves with all the good-natured humor in the world.

And the verrrrrry last line? Well, that is indeed shrieking to me: BUY the FINAL audiobooooook!!!

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