book review
Title: Geek Love
Author: Katherine Dunn
# of Pages: 368
Summary (from amazon.com): Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out-with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes-to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious-and dangerous-asset.
As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
Opinion: I got this book randomly from a coworkers when she was looking to get rid of some books, so I didn't really know what to expect from it. The fact that the story follows a family of travelling 'freak show' acts made it compelling, but it was the individual characters and their interactions with each other - not even the rest of the world - that made me keep reading. While you're following two different storylines, I often found one more compelling and interesting than the other - Oly's past as opposed to her present - which made reading the bits about the present a bit tedious. An interesting book that takes a skewed view of what makes a 'normal family', from the perspective of what we would seemingly consider abnormal.
Now Reading: The Fault In Our Stars by John Green
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