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Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel
Cruddy An Illustrated Novel
Author: Lynda Barry
On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping two of the 127 hits of acid found in a friend's shoe, a sixteen-year-old who is grounded for a year curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom, picks up a pen, and begins to write. Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddie...  more » Roberta Rohbeson, 1971. Her overblown, drug-induced teenage rant against a world bounded by "the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road behind cruddy Black Cat Lumber" soon becomes a detailed account of another story. It is a story about which Roberta has kept silent for five years, until, under the influence of a pale hippie called the Turtle and a drug called Creeper, her tale giddily unspools... Roberta Rohbeson, 1967. The world of Roberta, age eleven, is terrifyingly unbounded, a one-way cross-country road trip fueled by revenge and by greed, a violent, hallucinatory, sometimes funny, more often horrific year of killings, betrayals, arson, and a sinister set of butcher knives, each with its own name. Welcome to Cruddy, Lynda Barry's masterful tale of the two intertwined narratives set five years -- an eternity -- apart, which form the backbone of Roberta's life. Cruddy is a wild ride indeed, a fairy tale-cum-low-budget horror movie populated by a cast of characters that will remain vivid in the reader's mind long after the final page: Roberta's father, a dangerous alcoholic and out-of-work meat cutter in search of his swindled inheritance; the frightening owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar and sometime slaughterhouse; and two charming but quite mad escapees from the Barbara V. Herrmann Home for Adolescent Rest. Written with a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Roberta's two stories -- part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz -- painfully but inevitably converge in a surprising denouement in a nightmarish Dreamland in the Nevada desert. By turns terrifying, darkly funny, and resonant with humanity, propelled by all the narrative power of a superior thriller and burnished by the author's pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.
ISBN-13: 9780613673556
ISBN-10: 0613673557
Publication Date: 12/2003
Rating:
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0 stars, based on 0 rating
Publisher: Rebound by Sagebrush
Book Type: School Library Binding
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

 CMoonShell avatar reviewed Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel on + 39 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
I couldn't read this book. The topic sounded interesting, if dark, but the language is just too crude for me. I hesitated to post it, but saw that it was wish-listed by several people and decided to let the next person judge for him/herself. I guess I decided I'm not one to ban a book just because I don't like it.
readergaltoo avatar reviewed Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel on + 42 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
This book is very dark, but a great read. The story deals with suicide, murder and family. Puts the DIS in disfunctional.
CharleneY avatar reviewed Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel on + 80 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
LOVED IT! and i'm not a teenager. but it was really cool. i guess you'd say it's a little (okay, a LOT) dark?
reviewed Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel on + 11 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
A dark and somewhat twisted fiction memoir of a dark and twisted girl and her very dark and twisted father.A good read but at times I had to put it down to wash my hands.
Read All 8 Book Reviews of "Cruddy An Illustrated Novel"


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