1) Within six weeks, you must be dating four girls simultaneously. No online dating or apps allowed.
2) One of those girls must be [insert female character from the first book]
3) The moment you start dating the fourth girl, you have two weeks to juggle all four girls to prove you are a true player.
4) You must arrange to meet all four girls at least once during the same week.
5) Complete this challenge and you complete The Flood and win the bet.
*Cue Mission Impossible theme*
Of course, this can only become a great disaster! Unlike in the previous book, though, the situations are somewhat less predictable. Heck, there were a few that kept my eyes glued to my Kindle screen because I wanted to find out what was behind door #3!
We meet some lovely socially awkward and/or disturbing characters. Ieuan (apparently pronounced as YIGH-un, who knew?) is a rather geeky Welsh guy who's new at Dan's office. There's some great chemistry between him and Jack, who insistently keeps calling him 'Iron'.
However, my favourite new character must be Dan's autistic new roommate...
I found this book to be written slightly better than the first one. I also had to laugh out loud quite a few times. Some of my favourite quotes:
"Probably not the best time for a wank, but it could have been my last!"
"I once kissed a girl that looked like Ruud van Nistelrooy. Does that count?"
Then there was a Carlton Banks dance reference and a Craig David reference, which makes me get to the following: amongst Dan and his friends, everything can be turned into a popular (preferably '80's or '90's) song, albeit with slightly different lyrics. It's pretty embarrassing to tell you guys about this, but that's what's going on in this house quite a few hours of the day. Every day....
So "Blue Moob, I saw you wearing a bra" could've been sung in my house easily and will probably be added to the repertoire from now on. Popular ones are also "It's the final cuntdown", "You're my heart, you're my boob", and "I wanna know what boobs are (I want you to show me)". Reading about other people doing this as well, made me feel a lot more normal. *twitches eye*
The Flood has awkwardness, a little bit of suspense, romance and comedy packed up neatly together. If you want to read something fun, I can highly recommend picking up this series. And yes, I'm calling it a series because the ending is hinting very unsubtly at a third book. I was hoping to read more about Dan and his friends, so I'm really looking forward to part 3, whenever it may be published. If you don't feel like reading several books for whatever reason, you can just jump into this one without having to read The Drought first. The characters are properly re-introduced in the beginning with a little recap here and there of the previous story, so you can just pretend this is a standalone novel. However, why would you want to do that??
I'm giving it four brownies with a generous amount of ice- and whipped cream on top!
A big thank you to Steven Scaffardi for providing me with a copy of his book in exchange for an honest opinion!
There's a hilarious Character Q&A I did with Steven Dan, Rob, Ollie and Jack on my blog here as part of the Lad Lit blog tour!