List Containing Books Clown Girl
| Title | : | Clown Girl |
| Author | : | Monica Drake |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 297 pages |
| Published | : | January 4th 2007 by Hawthorne Books (first published 2006) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Thriller. Contemporary. Suspense. Drama. Mystery |
Monica Drake
Paperback | Pages: 297 pages Rating: 3.39 | 6127 Users | 343 Reviews
Rendition Toward Books Clown Girl
i am re-writing this review & re-rating this book with a lower rating thanks to a barrage of comments from the book's author, as well as the author's obnoxious ass-kissing friends. these folks made me really stop & think about how i felt about this book, & i came to the conclusion that i liked it even less than i thought i did initially. i usually reserve my one-star ratings for true stinkers--books that made me froth with loathing. this book was just disappointing & dull. it wasn't really interesting enough to get worked up over, until the author began pestering me about her derivative kafka references & fantastical "imaginative" settings, & then i started to think about how much i loathed the main character of this book: a self-centered, passive, bratty, truly pathetic creature who is an aspiring clown. there was nothing like-able about this character, or any other character in the book. the protaganist has a miscarriage early in the book (off-stage) & spends the rest of the book limping around her setting feeling sorry for herself, wondering if she should try to stick things out with her absent clown boyfriend or give in to a burgeoning romance with a dull cop. this is pretty much the crux of the action: clown boyfriend? new cop boyfriend? clown babies? cop babies? & who took my rubber chicken, which is some sort of pathetic security blanket for the clown relationship? this was actually a rung below chick lit because not only was the female protaganist painfully insipid & seemingly powerless to make proactive decisions about the trajectory of her own life, as i have come to expect from the worst of chick lit, but she was patently unlikeable while she was wafting about being helpless obnoxious. i mean, at least the protag of the shopaholic books was kind of witty sometimes. this girl was a witless dullard, & i know it sucks when people don't like your books, but them's the breaks when you publish. attempting to brow-beat people into liking your stuff & sending emissaries to brag about awards you have won is unlikely to have much effect on people with a true understand of the quality expectations they bring to a book. writing a book is hard. writing a good book is even harder. this was not a good book.Specify Books To Clown Girl
| Original Title: | Clown Girl |
| ISBN: | 0976631156 (ISBN13: 9780976631156) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Oregon Book Award Nominee for the Novel (Finalist) (2007) |
Rating Containing Books Clown Girl
Ratings: 3.39 From 6127 Users | 343 ReviewsPiece Containing Books Clown Girl
Abandoned this about half way though. Such surrealism in novels just doesn't seem to work for me. I had no incentive to finish this to find out what happens, as I wasn't really sure what was happening as I was reading it. Such an intriguing premise, and I was enjoying it initially, but the weirdness just started to drain my attention. It was all a bit much, and none of it was written in a way that I thought was particularly special. Still really interested in picking up this authors short storyAmazon has been recommending this book to me for a long time, and I finally decided to take them up on it. I should have done so a lot sooner. Man, whoever have thought Amazon would recommend me something that was actually GOOD? Considering they recommend the Spanish version of novels to me (I can't read Spanish and have never given Amazon the idea that I could), you wouldn't think so. However, "Clown Girl" makes up for all of the bad recommendations Amazon has ever given me. This is a seriously
I'd seen and nearly bought Monica Drake's first novel a few times in bookstores before it arrived as a Powell's Indiespensable selection. The story is a lighthearted, absurd tale of Nita/Sniffles, a woman trying to make ends meet working as a clown while dealing with a dysfunctional long-distance relationship, a lecherous ex-boyfriend landlord and his vindictive girlfriend, an agent with none of her interests in mind, and a cop who conveniently reappears to save the day whenever Nita is picked
What an interesting experience to read a book the whole way through and not once, ever, did I like or even care about the protagonist. I didn't care if she got a happy ending, and, frankly, would have preferred a catastophic demise. I kept feeling like the book would deliver a good sucker punch, but it just kept loitering in the zone between odd and annoying. I couldn't even properly hate it. And this is a book about a CLOWN.Weird.
Monica Drake worked on this book for a long, long time. Longer than most people ever work at anything. Her writing is careful, beautiful, strange, frantic, and wonderful. Clown Girl tells the story of Nita/Sniffles/Juicy Caboosey, a performance artist working as a clown who loses her boyfriend, her baby, her dog, her rubber chicken, her urine, and her mind (at times) while trying to stay true to herself and her art. Throw in a pot-growing ex-boyfriend/landlord, a friendly cop, an agent who wants
Such a wild, strange book. It was funny, dark, and oddly erotic at times, and I really enjoyed this. I had only read some of Monica's shorts prior to this, but really found this to be an entertaining, thought-provoking, and touching novel. I can't wait to see what she does next.
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