欧宝娱乐

** spoiler alert ** This book is complex, creative, and mind-boggling. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the book is trying to grapple with what it's trying to describe into something you can visualize. It's not that Katherine Dunn doesn't do a fine job describing her material...it's just that the imagery is so complex and vivid that it takes a lot out of the brain to envision for oneself.

This book is about the outsider making the insider feel bad because the insider doesn't fit with the outsiders. This book is about belonging and acceptance in ways that are partly disturbing, but not unbelievable.

My favorite line in the book (there are many as Katherine Dunn is terrific with her imagery and her descriptions and analogies): ...a true freak has to be born.

My only complaint is the end of the book, how Dunn chooses to explain the point of the book at the tail end when I kind of believe it would have made better sense at the beginning. Although the book rarely leaves the first-person narrative or its framework even when entering into another person's perspective by way of the main narrator Oly, the tone does shift at the end and that bothered me.

I also don't fully understand the main character's last action...and I don't get the satisfaction of knowing whether or not the message of Oly is given out. Hence, four stars instead of five.