Sunday, July 15, 2007

I am recommending a book

It has stripes and a pink cover with a chicken on it. It's called A Complicated Kindness and is narrated by a 16-year-old Mennonite girl in a small Canadian town. She smokes and drinks and worships Lou Reed, and her commentary on life in a cultish religious community where everyone is related in several ways (her parents are also first cousins) is hilarious and sometimes very sad. There are parts of this book I really wish I had written.

That's sad, I said. No parents. And he laughed and said I've got something else and then he held up his cigarette in one hand and his bottle of Old Stock in the other hand and said: Mom. And Dad. When he dropped me off my own parents were playing badminton in the front yard. My mom was wearing white canvas Keds that she'd gotten in the States, and pedal pushers. And my dad was in his suit, of course. They waved to Bert and I told him to hide his mom and dad or I'd never get to go driving with him again.

If anyone wants to borrow this book, let me know. I'm almost done and I have access to a few other copies.

3 comments:

BookCannibal9 said...

Oh, you know I want to borrow this. I promise to read it really fast, and by that I mean I'll read it faster than I'm reading THE RAW SHARK TEXTS.

Is it a paperback?

I'm going to Utah in two weeks. This sounds like a good book to read in Utah.

BookCannibal9 said...

Also, this cover description reminds me of MAYNARD AND JENNICA, which has a pigeon on it, and I really want to read since I heard the author speak on a panel at BEA, but I don't want to buy it, because it's a hardcover, and I hate hardcovers.

Any chance you have this book?

Sarah said...

Hmmm...I don't have Maynard and Jennica, but you can definitely have A Complicated Kindness. I'll trade it for a swim lesson. And it's paperback!