Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn

Book excerpt: Kevin Kling's first book, The Dog Says How, brought readers into his wonderful world of the skewed and significant mundane. Kling does it again in Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn, a romp through a yearful of holidays and a lifetime of gathering material. A wiener dog with an amazing capacity for destruction impresses the whole family and contributes to their collection of favorite disastrous Christmas stories. A Choctaw and a nun go trick-or-treating on Halloween. A boy makes a frightening decision every year when he chooses which classmate gets the "Be Mine" Valentine. Kevin takes his mom to a Fourth of July demolition derby-and then he takes an epic trip around the bases at a ball game on Memorial Day. From tomfoolery with his brother in the backseat of their dad's car through his carefully considered instructions for ice fishing, Kling never loses the spirit of his story or holds back on its humor.