Detailed item info | Size | | Length: | 334 pages | | Height: | 8.8 in. | | Width: | 5.8 in. | | Thickness: | 1.0 in. | | Weight: | 16.8 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | "I was born into a mentally ill family. My sister was the officially crazy one, but really we were all nuts." So begins My Sister from the Black Lagoon, Laurie Fox's incandescent novel of growing up absurd. Lorna Person's tale is wrested from the shadows cast by her sister, Lonnie, whose rages command the full attention of her mother, a Rita Hayworth lookalike, and her father, a television network accountant full of Jackie Gleason bluster. Their San Fernando Valley household is offkey and out-of-kilter, a place where Lonnie sees evil in the morning toast and runs into the Burbank hills to join the animals that seem more like her kin. Lorna, on the other hand, is an acutely sensitive girl who can't relate to Barbie. "Could Barbie feel sorrow? Could Barbie understand what it's like to be plump, lonely, Jewish?" she asks. Imprisoned inside a cuckoo's nest of a family, Lorna faces the world armed with nothing but an unshakable faith in Art -- and perhaps the healing power of show tunes. Her childhood is spent as a failed Sugarplum Fairy, dancing around in her living room for an audience of none, hoping to transcend her parents' inadvertent neglect and her own awkwardness. As Lorna searches for acceptance in her teen years -- buoyed by Shindig! and Joni Mitchell -- she must also disentangle herself from her beloved sister's wild and morbid underworld. In high school, Lorna finds her place by not fitting in, finding solace and mutual support with a troupe of hippie friends as luminous and wacky as herself. High school also ushers in the arrival of The Boy and a gift for making poems. The imagination that sustained Lorna as a girl now carries her into the theater, placing her center stage for the first time in her life, where she finally finds the room to come to terms with her sister and parents. My Sister from the Black Lagoon is a wise-cracked bell jar, a heartbreaking study of sane and crazy that heralds the debut of a considerable talent. Knowing yet wide-eyed, lyrical, and witty, Laurie Fox's voice is a delight to listen to, one that sings the song of innocence and experience in an utterly new way.
Featuring gorgeous prose, unflinching honesty, sharp wit, and images that burn into the mind and heart, this story of growing up with a mentally ill sibling offers a profoundly affecting autobiographical novel in the tradition of "The Liars' Club" and the works of Mona Simpson. National as.
| | Industry reviews | In her first novel, said to be semiautobiographical, Fox links reality with fantasy as she adopts the perspective of a young child whom the reader follows into womanhood. Growing up in California during the 1960s, Lorna Person struggles with a mentally ill, emotionally disturbed sister. Lorna must cope with their love-hate relationship and her heightened dose of teenage angst, which become fodder for her poetry and for her acting. Characters are outrageous but manage to be believable. At first, the pace is quite slow, even tedious, but as Lorna matures, so does the writing. Still, this is recommended only for readers interested in the genre of fictionalized personal tragedy. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/98.] Myah Evers, formerly with "Library Journal"
Garden
A triumph of storytelling verve, dark humor and unabashed candor, Fox's autobiographical first novel (a poet, she wrote Sexy Hieroglyphics: 3,335 Do-It-Yourself Haiku) is the enthralling story of Lorna Person, daughter of a TV network accountant and a lovable 1950s mom and younger sister to Lonnie, the truly crazy child with a "frown that could launch nuclear missiles." Lonnie's mental illness is the natural disaster of the Person family, leaving every member hanging onto shreds of their selves. Or as Fox so aptly puts it, "Life with Lonnie was the only story. Until this story, which I hope to God is my own." In 23 funny, sometimes heartbreaking chapters, Fox takes Lorna (known to her sister as Oozy) from her lonely childhood in Burbank, Calif., to her roller-coaster teens in the San Fernando Valley and finally to UC-Santa Cruz, where she begins to claim her life. Many of the traumas and dramas are achingly familiar: an awkward childhood; an unwanted move; the discovery of friendship, love and sex (for this lucky girl, first love and first sex are mated); and, of course, the parents' divorce. No doubt, if that alone were Fox's material, she would have made a terrifically entertaining tale of it. But it isn't. What shadows this story is the crazy, terrorizing sister who dresses like a boy, wails like a bobcat and says, only too perceptively, "home sour home." As much as Lonnie torments her, Lorna does love her sister, trying always to protect her from taunts and rocks and the knowledge that her brain works differently. And that is where the tension lies: How will Lonnie's Oozy ever become Lorna? The novel's subtext is television (apt for a novel partly set in Burbank), and, like TV, the narrative is episodic. A few episodes fall flat, yet big-hearted Lorna sustains this fresh and potent tale. Author tour. (Aug.)FYI: Fox worked at Warwick's Bookstore in California and helped start their reading program. She is a writer-in-residence in L.A. schools.
Bukey
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