Author: Monica Drake
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Rating: WARTY!
After disliking two Chuck Palahniuk novels in a row, you might call me crazy for reading one which - though by a different author - carries an introduction by him. The overly enthusiastic sycophantic babbling of one author whom I do not know personally makes no impression on me when it comes to recommending another author with whom I'm even less familiar, no matter how gushing the first author is on the front cover! My second warning should have been that Hawthorne Books describes itself as an "independent literary press". You put the word 'literary' in there and you've already downgraded your material by several notches or even nachos.
So while I'm more than willing to admit that I'm definitely crazy, at least I'm not willing to dismiss an author just because another author I don't like says nice things about them! The down-side of this attitude is that I have on occasion lived to regret it, of course. My hope going in to this was that this one would be the exception which proves the rule (where 'proves' is used in the old fashioned sense). I have to advise you now that I was disappointed in my quest.
Not to be confused with Girl Clown by Mary Wise, this novel started out just fine, with clown girl Nita plying her trade making balloon animals at a street fair near her lousy one-room 'apartment' which is actually the 'mud room' of some low-life's house. I'm not sure how much clowning is honestly involved in sculpting balloons art, but Nita faints from the heat because she was too dumb to bring along a water bottle, and she's taken to the ER. There we learn that while Monica Drake may well have an MFA from the University of Arizona, she's yet another author who doesn't get that it's biceps, not bicep, under the bp cuff....
Despite my detestation of first person PoV novels, this one turned out to be not so bad. It was not obnoxious, and Drake has a nice sense of humor (yes, josh and Drake go together - and if you get that one you must be an ex-pat Brit like me...). My early assessment of this novel was that it was entertaining, despite a rocky patch here and there. I almost laughed out loud at the author's aside at one point: "...a hearse of a different color."
Nita is in a bad way, unfortunately. She's only two weeks past a miscarriage, the baby being that of the focus of her obsession: Rex Galore, a fellow clown, who is out of town at some clown college. He doesn't yet know that Nita has miscarried and probably doesn't care. Nita is underweight and not eating well at all, so she's more than likely anemic at the very least.
The hospital keeps her overnight and then sends her home with a urine collection kit which consists of a large jug and what's called in hospitals a 'hat' - which is a plastic catch bucket designed to fit on your toilet seat and catch your urine. Upside down it looks like a white hat. She's supposed to use this to collect urine for 24 hours, but she's not smart enough even to get that going.
Nita promptly loses her hat when running from a cop she thinks is going to accuse her of graffiti-ing a derelict building which she's passing through on her way home. Despite the fact that she recognizes the cop as the one who helped her the day before when she fainted, she flees from him with vigor that can only be ascribed to acute paranoia. Nita has issues. And some of her issues probably have issues of their own, too. Clearly this cop is going to be her love interest to replace the absentee Rex, even though he wants to run her downtown on mere suspicion of having stolen a lawnmower. What? This guy's a jerk. I had been mostly on-board with this novel until at that point.
The problem came when I put this one aside for another book where I had a deadline to read it. When I came back to this one, the first thing I asked myself was: "Why am I reading this?" I think once you start in on something you have an investment in it even if it's bad, and you feel like it might get better or overall you might like it, but this is simply a bad investment, and sometimes you have to get some distance from it to realize how badly you're squandering your time here, when there is other writing that begs to be read so it can reward you better. This is known as 'the sunk cost fallacy'. I see it often in reviews written by others, and that's when I ditched this novel. I had sunk too much into this to waste more time reading it. I can't recommend it.
