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3.0 

Clown Girl

By Monica Drake & Chuck Palahniuk
Clown Girl by Monica Drake & Chuck Palahniuk digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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.

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130 Reviews

3.0
“I really wanted to enjoy this; a surrealist take on capitalism and how the arts suffers when forced to be monetised? It sounds great. Strange and maybe a little difficult to follow, but potentially entertaining. The problem is- and this is something a number of reviewers here also remark- is that the joke only carries so far. In essence, this is a new adult, coming of age novella that stretched out a hundred pages too far but ultimately covers the same 'journey to adulthood' text that has been stomped on repeatedly in the past. Clowning is a stand-in for any other number of downtrodden groups in society. BIPOC, low-socioeconomic groups, drug users, NEETs, anything like that. Our eponymous Clown Girl, Nita, realises she's on shaky ground and needs to get out, fast. I DNF at about 25%. I could tell that she'd forget her ex boyfriend and would-be father for her child and hooks up with a cop instead. Having skimmed through the end, lo and behold, she does. Called it!!”

About Monica Drake

Monica Drake has an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches at the
Pacific NW College of Art. She is a contributor of reviews and articles to
The Oregonian, The Stranger, and the Portland Mercury and her fiction has
appeared in the Beloit Fiction Review, Threepenny Review, The Insomniac
Reader, and others. She has been the recipient of an Arizona Commission on
the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, and a Millay Colony
Fellowship, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers
Workshop.

Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk lives in Portland, Oregon. He writes satirical fiction and is best known for his award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher. His Internet following is extraordinary, mainly due to his website. Other works include: Choke, Invisible Monsters, Lullaby, and Haunted.

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