Review by Booklist Review
Johnny's mentally ill mother, Frances, thinks her children are gone and have been replaced by impostors. Each day, Johnny and his younger sister, Audrey, care for themselves with the help of an assortment of quirky friends and neighbors, including the make-believe family the Sandilands, who offer refuge and respite. Each day, they explain to their mother they really are her children and wait for their father, a long-haul truck driver and habitual liar. Unlike his father, Johnny can't escape the turmoil at home and is determined to hold the center in the small working-class town of Requiem. Johnny intersperses recollections of a tragic and complicated childhood with, what was for a while, a directionless adulthood, as he struggles to maintain relationships with his family and maybe make a life for himself. Dufresne's characters are poignant, their frailties both pitiful and hilarious in this novel of the strong push and pull of family entanglements.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the latest from Dufresne (Love Warps the Mind a Little) novelist John's newest manuscript doesn't impress his girlfriend, Annick, who thinks "it doesn't breathe." So he goes back and rewrites it as a memoir: a book within a book. In it, Johnny and Audrey grow up in Requiem, Mass., with their unraveling mother, Frances, who believes her children were replaced by aliens and who bathes in gasoline. Their secretive truck driver father, Rainey, almost certainly has something odd going on down South. The book unfolds like a series of nesting dolls: John meanders around his coastal Florida home, writing his novel, visiting with friends and going on appointments for teaching jobs, while Johnny lives with his mother's worsening condition, his father's absences, his mother's hospitalization and a momentous trip South. Then there are stories within the memoir within the story, including the one a woman tells about her friend, Ginger Rae, who talks of writing a neighbor's suicide note, then claims it's part of a story she herself is writing. John is a very amusing unreliable narrator, and Dufresne's witty, sardonic take on life's fictions leaps off the page. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
His mother is going 'round the bend again, his father has disappeared down South, and his little sister has locked herself in the closet. It's up to Johnny to try to save the family. With a six-city 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
Dufresne (Johnny Too Bad, 2005, etc.) travels to Requiem, Mass. The characters here are way beyond quirk--on a good day they might aspire to be wildly eccentric. The novel introduces us to a dysfunctional family (a redundant phrase in modern culture?) at whose center is "Mom," a woman who "[rolls] up her bologna into a tube and [eats] it like a cannoli, the ketchup dripping down her chin..." Her erratic gastronomic behavior is a symptom of her growing paranoia, which eventually becomes so bad she even denies the possibility that her children, Audrey and Johnny (the latter is the novel's narrator), can actually be hers (" 'If they were my kids, I'd love them, wouldn't I?' "). Her increasingly bizarre deportment includes extinguishing her cigarettes in her mashed potatoes and looking around at her family and asking, " 'Who are you people?' " Incredibly, the tone of all this is rather lighthearted, even frivolous at times. Rainy, Audrey and Johnny's father is a long-haul truck driver who cheerfully wills himself to stay away from home for weeks at a time--we soon find out that he has several other families cached away in various parts of the country. After being sent to a halfway house, Mom establishes a simulacrum of a "normal" life, at least insofar as she can with a bigamous husband and a couple of whacko children. Dufresne fills this novel with plenty of postmodern references; the writing itself is as much a subject as the oddball family. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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
