The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this charming novel, Darrin Doyle paints a captivating portrait of the all-American family—if the all-American family's youngest child ate an entire city in Michigan with a smile, that is. Doyle has a flare for writing about family dysfunction with a twist. With a unique blend of realism and fantasy, The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo is the moving story of the hauntingly beautiful Audrey Mapes, who began her illustrious "career" by downing crayons by the carton only to graduate to eating an entire city one bite at a time. With vivid, acerbic wit, Doyle details the life of the world's most gifted "eatist" through the eyes of Audrey's sister, McKenna. Through her eyes, we see the real tragedy of the Mapes story is not the destruction of a city, but rather, the quiet disintegration of a family who just didn't quite know how to love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crafting an elaborate fictional world for his second novel, complete with fabricated news reports and other source material ("verified" by the editor), Doyle (Revenge of the Teacher's Pet) successfully evokes a moment that will make readers wonder: could this be real? Audrey Mapes is a beautiful Midwestern girl born with no feet and given to eating nonfood items like wood, metal, fabric, or plastic without any adverse effects. Doyle's narrative follows Audrey and her family, including twin siblings Toby and McKenna, as they cope with Audrey's bizarre affliction her father by means of absence, her mother by pills, her grandmother by religion and her siblings by further eating disorders. Told from McKenna's point of view, the often disturbing story pursues Audrey from unhappy childhood through adulthood success; she earns fame through a traveling freak show and, eventually, arrives in the Michigan city of Kalamazoo for a climactic eating event. While Doyle's novel is relentlessly inventive, his characters are irredeemably unlikable, making it difficult to care about any of the bizarre goings-on.
