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Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / General / Dunn, Katherine
On Shelf At: Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Dunn, Katherine	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Dunn, Katherine	4-week checkout	Due 05-13-2024

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Most perverse book I have ever read submitted by marielle on July 13, 2011, 2:29pm I thought I was beyond being shocked. Apparently not. This is the most horrific book I have ever read. Certainly it's not for children; I'm not even sure it's for adults.

Read only if you can stand reading about the deliberate mutilation of children and adults through drugs, surgery, and fire; rape, incest, forced pregnancy and lobotomy. And murder, of course, but mere murder pales in comparison to everything else about this book.

Surprisingly I Like It. submitted by nickalee on July 24, 2011, 7:57pm I agree with the review that says this book is disturbing but I found it fasinating! Hard to believe that this family could be more functional that a lot of "normal" famlies I know. It's surprising how many times I think of this book and it's been years since I read it.

A rec from a carney submitted by Peter Pasque on August 10, 2015, 11:28am A good friend of mine recommended this book to me. He was born in the circus and ran away to go to college! It's a great read.

Dark but comforting, in a weird way submitted by lisa on August 28, 2015, 11:25am Read with some distance, it's not so terrible, to me. It's fiction, after all. Not asking us to imagine what happens as having actually happened. Horrific things in fiction sometimes make a kind of weird/sick sense, in the world/circumstances of the setting of the novel, and it's a delightful stretch for the mind, even when the milieu is so unsavory. Plus turning something on its head---sometimes being a freak is good---and then carry it to an extreme, and the relativity of everything, in cultural and personal values, comes into a sharper AND broader focus at once.

If you're looking for characters like the people you know walking around clean comfortable Ann Arbor, this isn't the book for you.

The best carney book submitted by Lucy S on August 30, 2015, 1:31pm I couldn't put it down. Fascinating!

Twisted, but thought-provoking submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 15, 2017, 8:20pm Odd, dark, and twisted, this book is a conundrum. It wasn't that enjoyable to read, yet the story had a draw to it. Part of it was that the story was about the sort of train wreck that you can't seem to turn away from. It's about a family of "freaks," children who were deliberately bred to be deformed/different by their parents in order to add interest to the traveling circus's midway. But the real focus isn't the flippered boy, the Siamese twins, or the albino dwarf hunchback who narrates it. It's the power-hungry eldest, Arty (with the flippers), who creates a cult following and manipulates all around him.

Arty says of those who follow and adore him, "You have to find something to like about them," even while he mostly despises and uses them. I think that this is actually the crux of the book... the author is challenging us genuinely to find something to like in a full cast of unlikeable characters. Both the major and minor sets of characters are rich and well developed. There is a lot to this story, both in story arc and personalities. There is a second story arc that is the narrator's current life that felt very disjointed from her childhood history, and moving between the two generally felt unsettling to me. But everything in the book was unsettling.

It felt to me like one of the premises of the book, and this was certainly one of Arty's and his family's stated perspectives, was that "norms" were all alike and actually horrified by their ordinariness, yet desire deep in their hearts to be unique. This is the family's guiding principle: that they are special, and that norms have it all wrong. But I feel like the author misses such a huge factor that it throws the whole book off, which is that their parents are both norms. The parents have found ways to identify their uniqueness and value. Why would the children not understand or question that, or at least why wouldn't the parents address that they are different from other norms (then the kids would know it was possible, at least). It's a hole in the story that feels like it matters, because 'freaks are special' defines EVERYTHING else that happens.

All in all, I think the book will spark a lot of interesting book club discussion. I wouldn't have read it without book club as a compelling reason, and likely wouldn't have stuck it out past the bizarre first couple of chapters. (The writing there is so disjointed that the paragraphs were barely comprehensible as English to me.) But it raises interesting questions about what makes us unique, how we view ourselves and each other, how power and love build or twist relationships, and the lengths people will go to for what matters to them.

Amazing submitted by emwinter on August 19, 2022, 2:57pm Highly recommend