Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel

Lynda Barry is a graphic novel genius. This word is tossed around but I’m using it carefully. If you were raised as a free thinker in the 50s-70s, you will love this. If you’re conservative and republican, devoutly religious or puritanical, pass!

Up in heaven, Flannery O'Connor wishes she could come back as Lynda Barry.

It took a bit to warm to this book. But once I did I warmed to it in a big way! A little difficult to figure out at first but for those that hang on long enough the rewards are great indeed! Told in the first person by "Roberta", a misfits misfit that you can't help liking and rooting for (although I don't think that I would want her as a house guest). I don't believe that I will ever look at a knife blade in the same way again. Not for the squeamish or faint of heart but it this is a definate page turner! Didn't want it to end. I plan on tracking down everything that Ms. Barry has written!

I have been a Lynda Barry fan ever since I was a wee tot, so perhaps I am a bit biased in this review... While reading Cruddy, I had a difficult time grasping that the book was fictional,despite all of the far out charatures and events that take place. After finishing the book, I found my mind wandering back into the book's harsh and bittersweet world,which to many, living off the backroads in many a cruddy town scattered across this country, is not far from reality. Furthermore, Lynda Barry specializes in illuminating characters who would otherwise languish, misunderstood and unaccounted for, particularly children and adolescents of alcoholic, abusive and psychotic parents(often refugees from wrecked marriages who resentfully regard their offspring as merely a nuisance contributing to the eternal drudgery of their lives) All of the elements in this book do(in some form) exist, in a spectrum of reality that most would prefer to be sheltered from, and Lynda Barry weaves them into a wonderful, mesmerizing, strangely comical albiet macabre piece of fiction. I would furthermore encourage anyone to pursue other works by Lynda Barry, such as her long running comic series Ernie Pook. Barry is a one of a kind master of her craft, be it in comic strip or literature form.

How does Lynda Barry do it? A Mass murderous father, knives with pet names, hallucinagens named "creeper", a fascination with the social lives of flies -- Certainly my childhood was nothing like this. So why does Roberta Rohbeson remind me so strongly of exactly what it was like to be an adolescent girl? I predict this will become a cult classic for girls who will hide it from their disapproving parents and read it under the sheets with a flashlight. For us grown up girls, it's one hell of a good read.