Monica Drake

A brilliant and hilarious book. I know that not everyone shares my sense of humor, but I disagree strongly with most of these negative reviews. Especially those that say Clown Girl just limps around town feeling sorry for herself. This is a girl with talent and ambition. She's constantly trying to improve her situation; she just doesn't always make the right choices.

I've never read anything like Clown Girl. I loved the character and I loved the book.

The Stud Book is a brilliantly written and totally engrossing exploration of breeding, mostly among a group of female friends in Portland, interspersed with fascinating details about animal husbandry.

Dark and absurdist in tone, the things that happen to these characters feel like they could really happen. I love it when an author really goes there. Even scenes I found off-putting (like Georgie's husband at the bar while she struggles at home with a newborn) paid off in the end.

Generally, I'm show more weary of books that bounce between narratives about multiple characters. When you like some characters more than others, it's frustrating to leave them behind for a less interesting storyline. In this book, I got wrapped up in all the characters, eager to see what would happen next.

As a rule, I like novels to have more resolution to their resolution than The Stud Book does. However, I will forgive Drake for this open-endedness because the book was so thought-provoking, I don't mind filling in the blanks with what I think will happen next.

So smartly written. I look forward to reading more from Drake. show less

I was fortunate enough to get this book at an Adult Bedtime Stories event. I say fortunate because it was not something that I would have normally picked up. But I am so glad I was introduced to it. The wonderful Monica Drake has a dry sense of humor that I find just hysterical, and this book shows it off well. But at the same time, it tears at your heart strings and is such a good portrayal of what it is like to be human. It takes a brilliant writer to create a book that's very much just show more about the characters and their lives. The particular human experience addressed in this particular story is procreation. Through the lives of several different women, we see the idea/experience of having children from entirely different perspectives. One is desperate to conceive, one has a child and is wondering if motherhood is all it's cracked up to be, another is dealing with (gasp!) a teenager, and another has opted for the furry kind of children instead. All the women are memorable and have stuck with me. Drake is brilliant and it shows. show less

Drake spins a marvelous tale but the real reason I think I loved this book so much is not only that Nita speaks to me in an almost eerie way, but also because Drake inverts the traditional chick-lit story by stating outright what it is that makes these clumsy, clueless, grandiose, insecure women appealing. She makes it clear from the very title what Nita is. She’s a clown. No mincing words. Nita is a clown and Drake shows how hard it is not to be a clown when hiding behind makeup, clothes, show more images and pie-in-the-sky ideas is all one has ever known. I’m a clown, though less clownish (I hope) as I get older but if you began as a clown, bumbling your way through life, you will find much to like about Nita and her slapstick life. In Nita, using the raucous background of clowns and her inversion of the modern chick-lit novel, Drake creates a character who tells a story we are familiar with but have not wholly heard before. Read my entire review here: http://ireadeverything.com/clown-girl-by-monica-drake/ show less