The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo

The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo melds a family drama, with all its inherent emotional heft, with something very like a monster movie. Doyle's characters are refracted through the narrative lens of McKenna Mapes, sister to the titular "Girl." Along with the fantastic aspect of its conceit--a girl, Audrey Mapes, who has a one hell of a case of pica, eats the city of Kalamazoo, and becomes internationally famous for it--her sister McKenna's fractured narrative voice, steeped in bitterness as well as regret, allows Doyle to write about those aspects of life that so many fiction writers engage without falling into cliche. It would be easy to dwell only on the idiosyncratic aspects of the book and appreciate it on that level alone. After all, can you name another book in which a girl eats a city? But, beyond the comedy and idiosyncrasy, it's the heartache at the center of the novel that delivers, that yawning hole in the Mapes family that takes an entire city to fill.

Darrin Doyle's fiction is so alive it can almost get up and walk off the page on its own. The story of The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo is unusual, creative and hauntingly memorable, not only because Doyle's topic is not just your typical scenario, but also because the characters are so real despite their quirks and eccentricities. Doyle's talent is amazing and it is a lot of fun to read his latest gem. Definitely recommended!!

As other reviewers have said on this forum, this novel is "weird" and "bizarre" and filled with "quirky characters." The language is fresh and original, and the descriptions are totally unique and unexpected, as illustrated by the scene in a bar frequented by Audrey, "The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo" : "Most of them [students] were children of 150K-a-year parents from Detroit suburbs, but living alone in a college town on the opposite side of the state let them pretend to be starving artists. These artists longed to touch the common man in order to express the dimness of his soul. These artists chain-smoked, downing pot after pot of coffee while splitting an order of fries five ways. These artists suffered physically, hunger being a tried-and-true method of unearthing the worms of their genius. These artists would impale the wrigglers onto hooks that they would then use to pierce a nose, a tongue, or, in the case of Audrey, a labia. A tortured metaphor, to be sure. But lest we forget, these were 'creative types.' " A beautifully written and inventive story!

Yes, most of the characters are fairly unlikable throughout. Yes, it's odd and dark and probably a much sadder book than many people are looking for. It's also a wonderful read. If you need comparisons, it's like John Irving grew up on SCTV and George Saunders instead of whatever he actually watched on TV and Dickens. Smart, funny, ridiculous, surprisingly touching, and fully aware that sometimes you need a character and sometimes you need a caricature. It's finding the balance between the two that's difficult, and it's a line that isn't easy to walk in a novel. It's really about a girl who eats a city. It's not a metaphor. It's about a messed-up midwestern family and the lengths people will go to to be alone. It's not a nice story and nothing really good happens to anyone. It's weird, but never just to be weird. There's no how-clever-I-am-in-my-postmodern-way ironic irony. There are no back-patting stretches of understanding and explaining morality. It never reads like a bad fanzine review of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow (although they do make an appearance--the only time I was taken out of the novel in its entirety; the eating of a city seemed more natural than a mention of these guys) in its treatment of the bizarre (and there's enough of it here for two books), but it also knows when to make a joke instead of a statement. It's not a dramedy; it's a drama and a comedy. It's smart, but never just to appear smart. The story revels in deformity, all of it; the physical and the mental and the things we call entertainment and media and our families but it never FEELS like it's about those things. It's just a story, told secondhand through the bull**** detector that I don't think a lot of writers have these days. I was left completely satisfied but also wishing there was another hundred pages. I don't know if I could say that about too many other books. I can say that I really haven't read another book like this one. It's highly original without being stylistically repulsive. It's a genre novel and also on a planet of its own. It's a conventionally written book that defies convention. It's no Confederacy of Dunces...but it probably breathes the same air.

I thought this book was amazing. It's at times both odd and moving, funny and dark. The book's opening (and title) tell of this bizarre, surreal event where a girl actually eats a town, and what follows is a moving story of a family falling apart. But what stands out about this book is the originality of the prose, so that sometimes I would just pause to re-read a line or paragraph or page. Lines like, "Eyelids puffy, he waved away their insults like mosquitoes...." or, "Audrey was beautiful like the fever that kills a virus. Like a vivid dream of an ex-lover. Like a perfect beach moment just before the carnation horizon is swallowed by a night so complete you forget pink is a color." The short chapters and brisk pace make this a fast, fun read. Wonderful book!