{"product_id":"clown-girl-isbn-9780976631156","title":"Clown Girl","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.\"\u003ci\u003eClown Girl \u003c\/i\u003eby Monica Drake. She’s an amazing writer and, she’s created this incredible world.\" —Kristen Wiig,\u003ci\u003e The Daily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is sideways humor: social commentary disguised as pratfalls. It’s surely one of the most polished and eccentric pieces of fiction to come along in recent memory, the result of several years’ work by this talented Portland writer. Drake’s humor won’t compute for every reader. Just the smart ones who dig gray and hot-pink neon.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Riffing on language and revising her jokes in nervous flurries, Nita is the most endearingly teary clown since Smokey Robinson.\" —\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eClown Girl \u003c\/i\u003eis a devishly quirky look at a downtrodden young clown adrift in the hostile streets of Baloneytown. It is a worthy fictional successor to another Rose City female writer’s highly original novel with not-dissimilar material—Katherine Dunn’s\u003ci\u003e Geek Love\u003c\/i\u003e, an instant idiosyncratic classic about freaks in a traveling carnival that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989.\" — \u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Post-Intelligencer\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Sniffles, the titular clown girl, is endearingly self-deprecating, an oddball comic who masks her insecurity with a show of bravado and, more literally, a crazy array of clown garb. \u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is a polished, quirky and often-funny look at the dark side of clown life.\" —\u003ci\u003eWinnipeg Free Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Can a farce involving strap-on 'pendulous breasts,' a rubber chicken called Plucky, biblical balloon tricks, a marijuana-eating puppy, clown fetishists and the phrase 'EKG=Nazis' also succeed as a work of psychological realism? Monica Drake’s debut novel \u003ci\u003eClown Girl \u003c\/i\u003eleads me to believe the answer is yes. \u003ci\u003eClown Girl'\u003c\/i\u003es pages give off the perfume of sun-baked concrete, cinnamon, turpentine, spilled beer, bruised fruit, piss and clown grease. It’s a sharp and engaging debut—which I suppose is a fancy way of saying I want to read it again.\" —\u003ci\u003ePhiladelphia Weekly \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Drake’s humor will strike some as dark, but it would be more accurately described as shades of gray shot through with hot pink. Her Nita is hilarious and poignant, fantastical and real.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Oregonian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Drake is raising expectations with \u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e, a tight, claustrophobic little tale with a charming cast of self-obsessed screwups.\" —\u003ci\u003eWillamette Week\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Drake’s imagination is boundless, her compassion intense. No matter how absurd a situation this antiheroine gets herself into, it’s impossible not to will her to get back out. The strange world that Drake creates in \u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is peculiarity entrancing and wholly, vividly imagined: You can substitute any put-upon, impoverished, outside-the-mainstream or even simply imperfect sort of individual or group for her clowns, or you can read \u003ci\u003eClown Girl \u003c\/i\u003eas a gorgeous mix of character study and unlikely manifesto about the artist’s place in the world.\" —\u003ci\u003eEugene Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Welcome to wacky, stressful Baloneytown, where clown prostitution, stoned dogs and fire juggling-\u003ci\u003ecum\u003c\/i\u003e-arson are the norm. [T]he pace of the narrative is methamphetamine-frantic, as Drake drills down past the face paint and into Nita’s core, often using Nita’s relations with men as the bit. Nita emerges as a fully-realized character, bearing witness to a lot of the emotionally ridiculous and just a hint of the sublime. [T]here is a lot more going on here than just clowning around.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Writers are nothing if not rivals, but competition as good as Monica Drake is a blessing. \u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is more than a great book. \u003ci\u003eClown Girl \u003c\/i\u003eis its own reality. We should all have an arch enemy this brilliant.\" —Chuck Palahniuk, author of \u003ci\u003eFight Club\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Monica Drake’s \u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is a high-voltage creation. She’s a passionate martyr to the art of clowning in a slapstick world that despises and exploits clowns. She’s hit a rough patch where the pratfalls hurt and the locals don’t get her jokes. She’s Groucho one hour, Chaplin the next, and a hospitalized Stooge or three by sunrise. She’s sad as Emmett Kelly, indignant as Holden Caulfield. Maybe she’s wrong. She’s certainly cranky. But \u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is mesmerizing, drunk on the high wire, gorgeous and dangerous fun.\" —Katherine Dunn, author of \u003ci\u003eGeek Love\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is an extreme novel—beyond metaphor, a hilarious book that asks the startling question: what does it mean to be serious about clowning? This intelligent narrative always keeps in mind the bleakness and desperation that initially caused a need for clowns, and that they, in their way, embody. Is there exaggeration in the book’s narrator, or in its world, or neither, or both? I found myself asking if I were myself a clown⎯and if not, why not? Caulrophiles and caulrophobes, prepare yourselves!\" —Peter Rock, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Unsettling\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Monica Drake’s \u003ci\u003eClown Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is a bright shining bubble of a novel, dark, funny and deeply strange. The writing is brilliant—I would read this novel for the sentences alone—but it is Sniffles herself and her struggles to come to grips with life in Baloneytown that stay with me. The word 'unique' is widely abused but I think, for once, it’s justified: this novel is not much like anything else, and all the better for it. A really exciting debut.\" —Kevin Canty, author of \u003ci\u003eWinslow in Love\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMONICA DRAKE \u003c\/b\u003ehas an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a contributor of reviews and articles to \u003ci\u003eThe Oregonian\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Stranger\u003c\/i\u003e, and the \u003ci\u003ePortland Mercury\u003c\/i\u003e and her fiction has appeared in the \u003ci\u003eBeloit Fiction Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThreepenny Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Insomniac Reader\u003c\/i\u003e, and others. She has been the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, a Millay Colony Fellowship, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers Workshop.","brand":"Hawthorne Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48532133118181,"sku":"NP9780976631156","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780976631156.jpg?v=1773182774","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/clown-girl-isbn-9780976631156","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}