Haunting, sparse, gripping, interesting and hilarious. Who would've expected clown sex to be portrayed in such a non-comedic and touching way. The image of their clown paint transferring and mixing on their bodies stuck with me, heh. ( )

Monica Drake creates a world where clowns just are part of the scenery. Her main character is extremely well drawn and her struggle to find her muse, live her life and relate to others is superb. A strong debut book. I'll absolutely pick up whatever Drake does next. ( )

Sniffles (real name, Nita) is a clown that has fallen on hard times in Baloneytown. Her boyfriend, Rex Galore is off for an interview at Clown College, leaving her alone to find her way. While he is gone, she dreams of becoming a famous art performance clown, but is instead stuck working fairs tying balloon animals and biblical images, trying to make an honest dollar. She works constantly at an art piece she hopes to premiere someday: A silent version of “The Metamorphosis”. Her world is divided into very set social scenes: The clowns, the cops, the rich folk who rent the clowns, and the rest of the trailer trash.

While performing one afternoon, Nita has a miscarriage. Without insurance, she is back on the street quickly until she suffers a panic attack and lands herself back in the hospital at the hand of Jerrod, a too kind cop. The doctors tell her she has a heart condition, and send her home to do a 24 hour urine collection to see if they can find anything out. On the way home, she sees Jerrod and because he is a cop, she runs. Cops always mean trouble for clowns.

When it is found out the Nita and Jerrod have been spending time together, Nita is thrown out of her home. Her landlord forbids any cop to be seen around their home, and rightly so – he’s a drug dealer and a burnout. Jerrod shows up in her life more and more, always there to bail her out when things get hard. Nita begins to wonder why he is being so kind to her, and whether or not he’s just another guy looking for a clown date.

In this strange world filled with coulrophobics and coulrophiles, Nita is stuck trying to find her way as a performer. Should she sink to the bottom and become an S& M clown? Should she stick to her path and create her own one-of-a-kind act? The lines between clowning and prostitution get more blurred, day after day as she waits for Rex’s return.

Nita pines for Rex to come home, over glorifying their love and their relationship until one afternoon, he just appears. Confused over her relationship with Jerrod, Nita quickly tries to solve her problems by throwing all of herself back to Rex. She is met at first with love and passion, but Rex quickly tells Nita that he has this wonderful idea for his audition at Clown College: A silent version of “The Metamorphosis”. Betrayed and baffled, Nita’s world which seemed to be falling into place becomes a mess one more time. Once more, she must start over and reevaluate her clowning life.

Opinion: Monica Drake took her time with this novel, it being her first, and it shows. The connections between characters as only slightly predictable, but are always well explained. She shows an interesting reflection of how we can take all of these cultures and sub cultures and blur the lines to make them what we want. The clowns are outcasts that the rich need for entertainment. The rich use them for everything, yet still fear them and their kind.

Near the end, Nita removes her clown make up, and hardly even recognizes who she has become. There is constant talk between Jerrod and Nita about how they are in costume (her, a clown, him, a cop) all the time, putting on an act that is more important than any act they know. Everything they have is a prop, there to illicit a response, to secure their future (him, a gun, her, a rubber chicken). Who are the underneath the image they display?

Drake has a very honest voicing through her novel, making her main character very believable. You feel for Sniffles, and want the best for her. You cringe when things go wrong for her and you root for her when things start going right. Jerrod comes across as a bashful, yet down-to-earth type. Every time he is brought back to Sniffles, I was excited to see what would happen. The glorification of Rex Galore really showed how easy it is to get lost within your love for someone and how human it is to feel entirely devoted to something you’ve really only idealized. The heartbreak and betrayal are real and the feeling this book evokes make it worth adding to your library.

Rating: On a scale of 1-5 stars, this book is a 4.5. It took me awhile to get passed the veil of Baloneytown and realize that this book is set in modern times, but in a world full of literary metaphor. Once I got into the sync of things and accepted a little suspense of disbelief, this book really got enjoyable. I loved the format of it: titled chapters. It made each section feel like its own episode in Nita’s topsy-turvy life. Drake did a great job really making her unbelievable world believable, which made me take yet another fun look at the world we live in. It’s easy to see how Chuck Palahniuk and she are such good friends. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I AM THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR OF THIS REVIEW, as well as the owner of CCLaP; I am not reprinting this essay illegally.)

I've talked here before concerning the surprising things I'm learning about books these days, now that I've been a daily critic myself for about nine months now, and especially two factors that more heavily influence what we think of a book than a lot of us realize -- of where we in particular are in our own lives when we read the book (in terms of age, experience, career level, etc), and also how much we've heard about a book before we've read it ourselves. And really, if you want a perfect example of what I'm talking about, let's take today's book under discussion, Monica Drake's highly popular 2006 debut novel Clown Girl, a book that for a couple of years now has been getting talked about in glowing terms from just a whole pile of people I know and admire; I mean, c'mon, the introduction was written by Chuck Freaking Palahniuk, who by the way happened to be a member of the academic writing workshop where this novel first took shape.

And then I read it. Hmm. And I realized that it's not so much that this novel is truly unique or original that it's been getting so much attention, but that it uses a highly unique and inventive trick for telling an otherwise pretty plain story -- that is, Drake tells the story of a struggling young artist in the corporate world through the metaphor of professional clowns, a gimmick I can literally picture a tableful of dour grad students with tasteful beards and drab GAP sweaters delighting over when first coming across at some summer workshop in some quaint upper-class small town in the Hudson River Valley. Because admittedly, the gimmick is a cute one, one that can be stretched further than you ever thought a "clown in the corporate world" one could; how our unstable hero Nita got into the whole industry in the first place for its performance-art qualities, because of the grand tradition of French mimes and Cirque du Soleil and all the rest, but now finds herself working corporate parties and other "red-nose events" in order to pay the bills. And how her fellow-clown boyfriend is off in northern California as we speak, interviewing for "clown college" (i.e. grad school at UC Berkeley); and how she is getting pressured by her lesbian co-workers to get into the erotic/stripper side of the whole clown scene for extra bucks; and how when she misplaces her rubber chicken, she puts up flyers all over the neighborhood as if it were a lost dog. Yeah, cute, like I said, a trick just good enough to hold together an especially strong slam poem or New Yorker short story.

Ah, but here's the problem, that the gimmick wears thin in a 300-page novel; and when it does, you're left with a pretty typical grad-school storyline at its core, one that could be substituted with the plotline of a thousand other stories by grad students without anyone ever being the wiser. Because when all is said and done, Clown Girl is ultimately about unpleasant white slackers in their twenties, deliberately living in sh-tty neighborhoods not because they have to but because they are rejecting their white-bread middle-class backgrounds, pursuing lives as conceptual artists and small-level drug dealers and full-time academes as a way of pushing off real life as long as possible. And this gets into the complication I was talking about -- because I used to like such novels, see, back when I was in my early/mid-twenties myself and living more of that kind of lifestyle myself, and can understand why so many people I respect have been going nuts over this book recently. It's not a bad book, that's the point I really want to hammer home today; it's just that I've read this story way too many times in my life now, a story I find less compelling with each year I get older, a story that ultimately cannot be saved by a literary gimmick no matter how cute that gimmick is.

And this gets into the second complication I mentioned before -- that since I had heard so many great things about this book going into it, I'm tempted to be more disappointed than normal, and to give the novel a lower score than it deserves. And the truth is that it doesn't deserve a low score -- it's a well-written book, after all, a tight and plain-spoken story that you can get through in a single day if you're dedicated. It's just that you need to be careful with this book, to not expect too much out of it, to accept that it's a product of an academic environment and therefore has all the trappings of grad-school literature. Do this and the book is sure to entertain; expect more like I did, and you're bound to be disappointed.

Out of 10: 7.5 ( )

When I started reading Clown Girl, I had high hopes. The book had an interesting premise and it was silly. But that is all it was...silly. It never really got that deep or THAT funny. Yes, the idea of a woman who goes around posting up notices that her rubber chicken has gone missing is amusing, but after that, it kind of lost its charm. The book itself was hard to follow and after about 175 pages, I lost interest. ( )