Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About

December 2, 2002
Millington's debut novel is an outgrowth of his Web site of the same name, on which he has been posting, for the last year, comic vignettes about life with his German girlfriend. Predictably, it consists mostly of comic bickering between first-person narrator Pel Dalton and his own German girlfriend, the insouciant Ursula Krötenjäger. The couple lives in a ramshackle, dirt-cheap house in "an area of the northeast of England so dire that the government was applying for a grant from the European Union for it to be placed under martial law" with their two young sons. Pel is something of a slacker ("for me, half-heartedness is a full-quarter too hearted"), the bumbling head of an IT team at the local university library. After their house is broken into, the marginally more conventional Ursula insists they look for something in a better neighborhood. House hunting, like most of the other plot turns in the book—which include Pel taking over for his mysteriously vanished boss and becoming the courier for a Chinese gang—is mostly an opportunity for lots of funny sparring on every subject from whose turn it is to defrost the refrigerator to whether "cock" or "dick" is the better euphemism for penis. Overall, the comic material is uneven; some of it is overwritten and a bit obvious, but at its best, Pel's narration is side-splitting. There are no shattering insights about men and women, but the book never pretends to be more than it is: an entertaining and genuinely funny romp through the trials of coupledom.

December 1, 2002
The battle of the sexes continues unabated in British author Millington's quirkily comic debut novel. Pel and his German girlfriend, Ursula, have two children and any number of differences between them. He watches a lot of television and so can be depended on to know when Britain declares war on, say, Finland. Ursula is more outgoing and talks to the neighbors a lot, so she knows, for instance, what neighbor is harboring nuclear weapons in the garage. Pel works in the computer section of a library or, more properly, a Learning Centre, which is attached to a shiny new university whose students are recruited by a Japanese crime syndicate. What's more, the new computer lab is being built over the remains of an antediluvian graveyard, which raises the interesting issue of what to do with the bodies. Speaking of which, after a top administrator disappeared a number of years ago (and nobody noticed), her salary has funded many such valuable projects. Students of academic satire such as James Hynes's Lecturer's Tale will find much that might be familiar and funny here. The inevitable comparisons with Nick Hornby shouldn't detract from Millington's unique, laugh-out-loud take on sexual and academic shenanigans. For all large public libraries.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2003
Readers may already be familiar with Millington's work from his Web site, Things My Girlfriend and I Argue About, or his weekly column in the British newspaper "The Guardian," both of which chronicle Millington's absurd domestic disagreements with his longtime German girlfriend Margret. In this novel, long-suffering Pel and his strong and opinionated German girlfriend Ursula also argue about many trivial matters, but their bickering serves as a background to a meaty plot. Pel, who works in a library at the University of North-Eastern England, becomes caught up in international crime after his boss mysteriously vanishes from the library. The book's tone is humorously droll, but tension rises as the newly promoted protagonist negotiates the world of upper-level management. Things take a turn for the worse after Pel realizes both that the new university extension will be built on a historic burial site and that the university is hiding deadly nerve gas in its foundations. Since Millington already has millions of fans and this book has already been optioned for the movies, librarians may want a few copies. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)