Review by Booklist Review
Pixie, an aging Miss New Jersey, believed that the Miss America crown came with a guarantee of an idyllic family life. She fought for the title but didn't make the first cut. Over the years she has struggled for that picture-perfect family but has always come up short. She eloped with her first husband but ended up a divorced, single parent when he decided to explore his homosexuality. Her second husband, a less than skillful dentist, is a controlling, boorish man who married Pixie for her looks and, as her looks faded, so did his love. Haunted by her father's death and a part of her past she can't quite remember, Pixie fights her demons through self-medication and housecleaning while her family crumbles. With barely one foot in reality, Pixie falls over the edge when her mother reveals a closely held dark secret. Told in alternating chapters by Pixie and her 16-year-old son, Baggott's biting, darkly comedic, and brutally honest narrative takes a sardonic look at suburbia and family dysfunction. --Carolyn Kubisz
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Baggott takes family dysfunction to a new level in a sophomore effort (after last year's Girl Talk) full of kookiness and calamity. It's 1987, in suburban Delaware, and Pixie Stocker, Miss New Jersey of 1970, and her 16-year-old son, Ezra, take turns narrating this tale of domestic wheeling and dealing. As the novel opens, we learn that Pixie, who divorced her first husband (a handsome household cleaner salesman and Ezra's father) has shot her second (but only in the arm). Why did Pixie shoot dentist Dilworth Stocker? What is it like for intelligent Ezra to have grown up in such a bizarre family? These are some of the questions Baggott answers over the course of her highly readable narrative. Her wit is caustic, verging on mordant: sickly young Ezra, for example, can't have a cat, but he can pet his mother's fuzzy slippers while she purrs; while in the aftermath of the shooting, Pixie tells her daughter, Mitzie, that it was "something like the death of a beloved pet, bound to happen eventually to every American family." The family also includes Pixie's mother, who's convinced humans descended from fish, not Adam, and whose take on the Immaculate Conception is that Mary should have said "no" to Gabriel. Pixie's father, drunk, drowned while attempting a Houdini escape trick, and Cliff, her brother, was killed in Vietnam after the slaughter of a village. From the hilarious Ezra's seduction by the girl next door to the hideous Pixie's beauty contest mentor's self-induced abortion Baggott explores contemporary "civilized" behavior and the imperfections of a "perfect American family" with wit and grace. (Apr.) Forecast: It's hard not to appreciate this light but still affecting title, and a 12-city author tour plus online chats and interviews should attract more readers to Baggott's particular blend of irony and charm. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
More Girl Talk: a former beauty queen tries to make sense of her life, even as her 16-year-old son finds that his is spinning out of control. With a 12-city author tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Three generations of a dysfunctional family come full circle to discover that the definition of the perfect American family allows for a lot of latitude. Baggott (Girl Talk, 2001) sets her second novel in suburban Delaware 1987, where 16-year-old Ezra is recounting the events that took place six months earlier, the main one having been his summer work as gardener at the Pinkerings, a job that included his having sex with Janie Pinkering, ignoring the lawn, learning tennis, and-embarrassed by his webbed toes-avoiding the pool. At home, life includes somehow enduring his half-sister Mitzie and oafish stepfather, the dentist Dilworth Stocker, who rescued his wacky ex-beauty queen mother, Pixie (Miss New Jersey, 1970), from a life of deliberate prostitution after Ezra's dad left. " It's money and sex, isn't it?' Pixie would tell her dates. Let's just make it a fair exchange without the middleman. . . .' " Ezra's story of teenage angst is alternated with Pixie's much darker ruminations: about her unsupportive mother, the "stranger" who invaded her girlhood bed, her friend Wanda (Runner-up Miss Bayonne, 1963) aborting her unwanted child with a knitting needle, her brother Cliff blown to pieces in Vietnam, and the discovery of her "embarrassingly handsome" husband in bed with a man. The bubble bursts when Pixie's mother's comments bring the truth about the past into focus and Pixie ends up in the loony bin after shooting Dilworth as he sleeps beside her. With the family torn apart, Ezra learns that his real father is gay and irresponsible, that Janie Pinkering never loved him, that Dilworth and Mitzie are dear to his heart, and that maybe they are, after all, the perfect American family they've all been dreaming about. An accomplished and charmingly messy tale of love and redemption. Author tour
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
