Rachel was right. ( )

This tragicomedy is many things: bizarre, disturbing, unique, funny, and intriguing. Any fan of Barry's comics will recognize the artistic style in the illustrations, but be aware that it is much darker than most of Barry's work.

Barry's grim humor

is only bright note in tale

of teen's cruddy life. ( )

I'm evidently the only person who really doesn't like her work. I don't mind depressing books, but this one made me hate the world when I'm in a completely optimistic mindset and that wasn't good for me at all. ( )

Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe. The cruddy girl named Roberta was writing the cruddy book of her cruddy life and the name of the book was called Cruddy.
Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood. She could not give the authorities any information about why she was the only survivor and everyone else was lying around in hacked-up pieces. ( )

Cruddy
I picked this up expecting it to be like much of what I have read of Lynda Barry: heartbreaking, sweet, and immersed in adolescent pain. What I got was a terrifying novel that has elements of all these, but these elements are immersed in the horror-cum-fairy-tale that drives the book.

Roberta Rohbeson is a 15 year old who lives with her mother and sister in a cruddy house, on a cruddy street, in the cruddy part of town, in the cruddiest town in America. The girls' mother leaves them for long periods of time to find a wealthy husband. Julia, the youngest, spends much of her time watching TV. Roberta wanders around the neighbourhood, looking for action. She finds it in Vicky Talluso, a wannabe hippie with a bag full of drugs.

The girls meet a hippie-drifter named Turtle, who has an immediate connection to Roberta, and spurs her to tell her horror story. Three years ago, her father left her mother after his butcher shop fails, in pursuit of his father's inheritance. He dressed Roberta as a boy and renamed her Clyde, and they set off on what becomes a murder spree. While the father uses Roberta as a pawn in his killings, he also reminds her constantly that he is likely to kill her at any point with his case full of butcher's knives. What follows is surreal in its events, but reads as both dangerous and true. Fantastic. ( )

Cruddy is dark. Very dark. Kidnapping, child abuse, mass murder, tripped out teenagers, desperation, violent adults - only Lynda Barry could incorporate such dire circumstances and keep the narrative afloat with morbid humor, wry observations, and a wise and world-weary (to say the least) protagonist. Never sentimental, populated with characters strange and cruel, Cruddy is so compelling it had me anxious to leave work, just so I could curl up and devour the rest of the book.

I finished this book feeling raw and stunned and aching for Roberta, wishing there was more of her story to tell.

Harrowing, brutal, chaotic, darkly funny, heartbreaking, brilliant, and most of all, unforgettable. ( )

Wonderful. I love the voice of the narrator and the great teen angst-iness of it all. ( )

One of my favorite books ever! It is pure magic & it changed my life. A fabulously messed-up world in which everything is colored by this weird seventies burnout swamprock vibe. Hyperugly Roberta (who at times seems a deaf-mute but it's all a ruse) allows herself to be swept along by her father on a tour of a surreal backwoods populated by Beserkley hillbillies, hardass Grandmammies and the type of pasty-skinned thirty-year-old men who could normally be found (in our world) in their momma's basements but in this case bestow megalomaniacal titles upon themselves and carry out their hermitage in underground caves. I marvel at Barry's creations. Please read this.

Roberta (Clyde) goes on oddysey with dad; majorly dysfunctional murdering family

2.00 ( )

YA, dark, bildungsroman ( )