Instruct: Classify a given review as either positive or negative.
Query: Skip the book!

"A Christmas Story" is one of my favorite holiday films, so I expected to enjoy the book that inspired it. Instead, I hated "In God We Trust."Shepherd's writing is devoid of rhythm or beauty. The sentences, bogged down with far too many adjectives, limp along like bits of a fourth-grade theme paper.Shepherd is a hateful, bitter man. Slurs and offensive characterizations pepper the book and poison any of the sweetness that can be found in the movie version. There's plenty of hoary, old man humor about alcoholism and drunkenness too, the kind that better writers abandoned sometime in the early sixties.Reading this book felt like being cornered by a drunken, unwashed, polyester-clad uncle at a holiday party. One feels polluted afterward. If there were a way to cleanse, or even excise the brain cells that hold my memory of this book, I would.