Clown Girl
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.6
Monica Drake
Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a seedy neighborhood where drugs, balloon animals, and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, she struggles to live her dreams, calling on cultural masters Charlie Chaplin, Kafka, and da Vinci for inspiration. In an effort to support herself and her layabout performance-artist boyfriend, Clown Girl finds herself unwittingly transformed into a "corporate clown," trapping herself in a cycle of meaningless, high-paid gigs that veer dangerously close to prostitution. Monica Drake has created a novel that riffs on the high comedy of early film stars — most notably Chaplin and W. C. Fields — to raise questions of class, gender, economics, and prejudice. Resisting easy classification, this debut novel blends the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty with stunning skill.
AD
Buy now:
More Details:
Author
Monica Drake
Pages
336
Publisher
Hawthorne Books
Published Date
2010-08-24
ISBN
0979018889 9780979018886
Community ReviewsSee all
"This book has traveled around with me from Portland, to Spokane, to Shanghai, and Hong Kong. A friend in PDX really enjoyed it, bought it for me on my yearly pilgramage to Powell's, but the cover made me skeptical. (That's what you're supposed to judge a book by, right?) Then an ex girlfriend borrowed it and her synopsis (though positive) also worried me. "A clown world that's similar to ours... but different? Hmmm." Yet, another girlfriend borrowed it and really liked it. (I've had it that long.) So it was time to read it. It was much easier to read than I thought. Fun, breezy writing full of clown one-liners. It reminded me a lot of Confederacy of Dunces too! That was nice to see on other reviews, but shocking to see it as a negative thing. Anyone who didn't like COD probably as very different tastes than me. I'm excited to see how Drake's honed her skills in The Stud Book."
Andrew Greene
