Rating:🔋💪❤️
The Power of the Strength of the Heart is an audiobook written and read by Bobby Fingers.
This one takes a bit of explaining. Bobby Fingers is an artist who has been kinda famous in Ireland for a while as a member of The Rubberbandits. He is a musician, professional prop maker, youtuber, and now, romance novel author.
His youtube channel is extremely worth watching. Each video is 20 to 30 minutes of him dryly narrating his own making of a labor intensive diorama depicting a strange situation involving a celebrity. For example, “Drunk mel gibson arrest diorama” and “Jeff bezos rowing boat”.
At the end of each video, he reveals that he has buried the diorama and that the coordinates to find it are hidden, usually throughout the video. The dioramas are hunted for and found by his fans soon after posting.
One of his recent videos, “Fabio and the goose”, depicts the building of a diorama where airhead heartthrob Fabio Lanzoni face-smacks a flying goose on a rollercoaster.
Fabio is well known for being on the cover of hundreds of romance novels. Throughout the Fabio video, Fingers reiterates his desire to be on the cover of a romance novel himself. After all of the publishers that he cold-emails photos of himself ghost or reject him, he decides to write his own romance novel from scratch. This is The Power of the Strength of the Heart, and he is the proud, bear-chested man on the cover. The book was also used as the gimmick in which to hide the coordinates to the Fabio diorama, which has since been found.
With that out of the way, the review! You can imagine that an entire book written as basically a meme to get yourself on the cover of a romance book and reveal some GPS coordinates is quite bad…and you’d be (mostly) wrong!
Unlike Bobby Finger’s channel, which I would recommend to literally everyone, I would recommend The Power of the Strength of the Heart to basically nobody. It’s really, really explicit and disgusting. It’s also really funny. I had to stop listening to it multiple times for different reasons - sometimes I’d be laughing too hard alone in public, other times it would be too gross to tolerate all at once.
Most of the book is written as a parody of a generic romance novel. Robby, the main character, has sexual tension with pretty much everyone, and is simultaneously a heroic war hero and a sniveling man-child. Some chapters are written purely to gross you out, some are super boring, and there’s one that’s just Bobby Finger’s recording a voice note to his friend thanking him for the idea for the previous chapter and describing what’s going to happen in the current chapter, only to skip straight to the next chapter. The sex scenes are ridiculous. There’s one chapter that’s more like a horror novel than a romance story, selling the idea that Bobby Fingers could write a good book if he wanted to, but that’s not what this is. Everything is intentionally the way that it is.
I feel like it’d be a fun listen for a road trip with some friends. I might try to put together a table read script from it for some people I suspect might enjoy it.
Do with all of this information what you will. Don’t say I ever recommended it to you.