Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22769 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780976631156
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
As Drake's debut opens, Nita, otherwise known as Sniffles the Clown, is tying balloon animals for a horde of greedy, sticky children at a fair. Suffering what may be a cardiac event, she's rushed to the hospital—after trying to get help from a clown fetishist, who simply drops his phone number on top of her prone form. Welcome to wacky, stressful Baloneytown, where clown prostitution, stoned dogs and fire juggling–cum–arson are the norm. Nita struggles to make enough money clowning to keep herself in oversized shoes and squirting daisies, while also saving for Clown College tuition for her boyfriend, handsome clown Rex Galore. But Rex is mostly MIA, and Nita's longing for him settles on local cop Jerrod. While not much happens, the 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. Some plot threads never quite come together, and a few characters are underdeveloped, but there is a lot more going on here than just clowning around. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
An introduction by novelist Chuck Palahniuk and a rubber chicken on the cover promise lots of nervous laughs for Drake's dark debut. The tale revolves around Nita (aka Sniffles the Clown), who inhabits Baloneytown, a depressed, crime-infested metropolis where residents peer warily out their windows when a cop car drives by. Nita aspires to high art but finds herself caught in a vicious cycle of corporate clown gigs that creep ever closer to prostitution. She misses her boyfriend (and fellow clown) Rex Galore, who has gone off to interview at Clown College. And now her dog has gone missing, her relationship with her housemates is on the skids, and the only friend she has left is a golden-haired policeman who is surprisingly concerned about her well-being. Drake, who teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art, renders rich, sinewy prose (with heady references to Chaplin, Kafka, da Vinci, and the like), but her offbeat subject matter and plot would play better as a short story. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Drake is raising expectations with Clown Girl, a tight, claustrophobic little tale with a charming cast of self-obsessed screwups. -- Willamette Week

Clown Girl is a devilishly quirky look at a downtrodden young clown adrift in the hostile streets of Baloneytown. -- Seattle Post Intelligencer

Clown Girl is a polished, quirky and often-funny look at the dark side of clown life. -- Winnipeg Free Press

I had the urge to put the book down and applaud. -- The Stranger

Nita is hilarious and poignant, fantastical and real. -- The Oregonian

Riffing on language and revising her jokes in nervous flurries, Nita is the most endearingly teary clown since Smokey Robinson. -- Entertainment Weekly

[Clown Girl] is surely one of the most polished and eccentric pieces of fiction to come along in recent memory. -- Seattle Times

Customer Reviews

Playing The Fool
Monica Drake is a decent writer. She plays with the language the way clowns play with pratfalls and cream-filled pastries. There's no doubting that among the pages of "Clown Girl" is hiding an author with enough charm and wit to pen a book brimming with both humor and heart.

This, however, is not that book.

The story follows young Nita (you can call her Sniffles) who is struggling to make ends meet. Working the circuit in her home land of Baloneytown, Nita twists balloons into vague religious shapes, tries to find her lost rubber chicken and her drug-addicted dog, and deals with the absence of her beloved, a man named Rex Galore (he's away at Clown College, paid for by guess who?). The only thing is, Nita's got a heart problem (uh, ahem, an actual, physical heart problem), and so she's working fewer hours, earning less money, and her ex-boyfriend/landlord is threatening to kick her out of house and home. Add to the mix a cinnamon-scented copper with a stalkerish streak, and you've got more problems than a clown should have to deal with.

Drake shows us Nita's struggles through her daisy-shaped sunglasses, so those difficulties are all tinted with a painted smirk and lots of punny rejoinders. It's a silly-serious mood that works quite well at first, but which begins to grate more and more as the novel devolves into soap opera theatrics. By the final pages, what is meant to be funny is as eye-rolling as any knock-knock joke, and what is meant to be serious is just plain laughable.

Nita's/Sniffle's coworkers try to get her to do more high paying gigs (let's call it Clown Cuddling for Cash), to pander to the creepy-grins of the coulrophilic (read: Clown fettishists), but she (mostly) turns away from that path and chooses the road of commitment and dedication. This means she does a lot (A LOT) of pining for Rex, and she spends a good deal of time working on a mime-ish interpretation of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. These are lofty goals for a clown; good for her.

Unfortunately, for a woman with (sometimes shifting) standards and such ambitious intellectual pursuits, Nita is infuriatingly dumb. You can quite easily guess the conclusion of this book after reading twenty pages of it, as long as you're not too creative about it. And in the meantime, you must watch as Nita pushes back against obstacle after obstacle, most of which she has erected herself. Her heart, dog, chicken, relationship, and money problems all come across as the products of someone who is either too dumb to think for themselves, or simply can't be bothered to do anything but be sad and beleaguered. There's nothing quite as irritating as a central character who manufactures her own problems and then wonders for pages and pages, "What's to be done?"

To be fair, Ms. Drake is the real manufacturer here, and her literary intentions are clear: she wants you to sympathize with and care for Nita. Unfortunately, it is not a character's hardships that make them worthy of love or compassion, it is their hearts and souls. Nita may very well have one of those, but she's so busy mugging, jesting, and hiding under face paint (even to the last pages), that she is less a girl than she is a clown.

That would actually be a good premise for a short story, a small sidewalk show, a five-minute social treatise on what we are and what we make ourselves into, but that is not what Ms. Drake is going for here. At least, not solely. The love story. The heart problems. The prostitution, money, stealing, running, and constant fumbles and falls. Well-written, well-painted, and cleverly phrased it may be, this three-ring circus still has two rings too many.

send in the clowns, where are the clowns...
Chuck has nothing to worry about here. While Drake has a great voice and a vivid imagination this book just ran out of steam. It probably would have worked better as a short story. I found Nita's self-imposed hardships to be quite grating after about 100 pages and there were still 200 pages of the same to go. It all got a bit repetitious and obvious after awhile. I also didn't find the book funny. I didn't laugh once. I have to add that I am in no way the sharpest tool in the shed but even I saw the ending coming a mile away.

Beaten Over the Head With a Rubber Chicken
Monica Drake is a good writer and very clever but that cleverness becomes a bit cloying. Certain topics - for instance, "Pluckie," the rubber chicken - lose their funniness and become more like water torture by the end of the novel. But clowns are known for overkill and Clown Girl is rife with it.

The book is well written and there are genuinely funny parts. If the reader has been searching for material that nominally deals with clown prostitution and clowns getting pregnant, then maybe this is the book you've been searching for. But for out and out weirdness, nothing touches Geek Love.