Product Description

A woman. A wall. Sometimes love blooms in the strangest of places... What would happen if a woman, tired of previous broken relationships, instead fell in love with her wall? Would she be spurned yet again, or would it be a match made in heaven? Gina Ranalli is the author of Suicide Girls in the Afterlife, 13 Thorns (with outsider artist Gus Fink) and Chemical Gardens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #708182 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 108 pages

Customer Reviews

The Wall of the Wild
Every guy's dream - a girlfriend who has a job, pays the bills, cooks, buys the beer, does all the housework, and initiates the sex. All the guy has to do is hang around the house. Being the wallflower isn't all bad, I guess.

It isn't all bad for the gal though - she gets to decide what they eat, what TV shows and movies they watch, no fighting over the remote, what brand of beer to buy and have sex only when and how she wants.

What really scares me is that I can imagine someone, somewhere, whose life is like that of our main character. I just hope the chapters aren't selections from Ranalli's diary.

Funny, clever, obscene, paranoid - They're coming to take me away ....

Emotional and Sexual Obsession with a Wall...
First, I would be surprised if someone didn't buy this book based on the premise alone. I mean, a woman falling in love with a wall.. How can you NOT want to read it?

The thing is, I could think of many ways in which that premise could have been handled badly. I'm so glad that it was handled brilliantly by Gina Ranalli. I say brilliantly because even though the premise sounds like fantasy, it's very real in what I believe to be a very astute meditation on mental illness.

Now, maybe that wasn't the author's intentions. Maybe I got it all wrong. But the nameless character (the woman who falls in love with the wall) is an "everywoman", a person who could easily be your next door neighbor or friend. The creepiness comes in when her loneliness turns into an obsession, both sexual and emotional, with a wall in her house.

Granted I've never been attracted to inanimate objects, the author gradually builds up the woman's obsession so that by the middle of the novella, it seems natural even though we are fully aware of just how bizarre the relationship is. That's also strange considering that the wall DOES NOT TALK as far as the reader is concerned. This book would've been a lot different if Ranalli had decided to put a voice to the wall (whether real or imagined). I don't know if it would've worked as well as it did if she had done that. Instead, I think she went the route that I imagine was probably more difficult (and therefore more fulfilling) to write.

Again, I took this book to be a bizarro look at mental illness. A lonely woman who has been treated badly by most people in her life finally turns to something she thinks will not reject her. It turns out to not be all she wanted it to be.

Anyway, I believe that if you books about weird love, obsession, and sex... than this is the book for you. It's short, sweet, and to the point but well worth the time and money.

A great book!
Gina Ranalli's book "Wall of Kiss" was a great read. Her writing style is very clear, which made the story very easy to visualize as I read it; plus this book is very funny. I laughed aloud a number of times. Three cheers for "Wall of Kiss" and Gina Ranalli!