I woke up this morning the first thought that went zinging through my head (as soon as my subconscious finished singing the Candy Mountain Cave song) was, Yay! I get to finish Famous Writers School.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been so wholly charmed by a book. Famous Writers School is not the best story ever, the most moving, the most linguistically dazzling, but it is damn charming. It’s kind of like Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea, a small book that goes a long way on clever concept alone.

Much like Dunn’s novel, Famous Writers School is an epistolary tale, told through the correspondence of Wendell Newton the man behind the Famous Writers School and his pupils. Not only do you get to read the students’ assignments you also get to read Wendell’s comments back to them. Really, it’s awesome.

At first I was thinking Wendell knew his stuff he writes to his students about character vs. plot, the objective correlative, and how you can write beautiful sentences but without any story driving them they mean nothing. Seriously the book is itself a wonderful writing lesson. But it’s more then that. Because you also get to see that Wendell is not all he’s cracked up to be and in fact, neither are his students. And, as if that’s not enough, you get to read two weird mysteries (but fun) written by Wendell’s students.

Of course my favorite, favorite part (and trust me I’m not giving too much away by telling you this) is when Wendell hooks up with one of his students, who then writes a ‘fictionalized’ version of their meet up. Wendell’s reaction is brilliant.

I think the best part of Famous Writers School is that it’s a nice light read, a clever concept and that its author Steven Carter (listen to him talk about the book on NPR) made it the perfect length. It’s a slim 250-page book, which is perfect because just about the time the concept gets a bit tiring the book is over.

I want to make all my writing friends read this book, because it will crack them up.