My ex-dentist resembled a potato wearing a Patek Phillipe. In those precious moments between the golf course and the cruise ship he would take the time to remind patients what good value our treatments were. Under the spotlights we could do little but stare, gurn and dribble, which he took, I presume, as a sign of our overwhelming gratitude. I thought that was bad enough, but it’s nothing compared to J.P. Wintergreen, the dentist villain of Nina Stibbe’s ‘dentally particular’ comedy Reasons to be Cheerful.
Set in Leicester in 1980, the novel is the third in Stibbe’s Sue Townsend influenced series of (stand-alone) books tracing the life of narrator Lizzie Vogel and her dysfunctional family. Now 18, Lizzie is an unqualified dental assistant to the rude, mouth-massacring Wintergreen, who can often be found ‘lying on the dental chair, in swimming trunks and protective goggles, under a sunlamp’.
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