Customer Reviews

Awesome

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Despite the misinformation in the Publishers Weekly review above, which I found overly cute, Pendarvis is NOT a YA author and AWESOME is most definitely NOT a young adult book.

It's hilarious and strange, and bawdy, and weird, and over the top, and off the rails. It's a tall, tall tale, rather like a Paul Bunyan whopper filtered through the consciousness of a snarky modern lout in his twenties. If you want a comical, surrealist shaggy-dog tale about a giant with an overactive libido and a surfeit of positive self-regard, this is the novel for you.

Pendarvis fans, by the way, will lap this up.

I took tremendous pleasure describing details of this book to the proprietor of Book Hampton Sag Harbor and attempting to explain to her that despite the cover, despite the weird PW review (did he/she read the book?), this is not a book for children... that is unless they're into semen-powered cars equipped with a giant penis-pump, submarine-sized anal suppositories, the most hysterical penis-removal scene in recent literature, and numerous other descriptions of dozens of body fluids you didn't even know you had. The book is fantastic but a YA novel it aint.

Jack Pendarvis knows how to write a funny sentence. He writes a lot of these to form funny paragraphs, which are used to compose funny pages. The result is Awesome (har har har).

I literally chose this book by its cover. What a fun read! Highly original and laugh-out-loud funny in places, it reminded me of some of Mark Leyner's best early work. Agree with the other reviewer that this is neither cute nor YA. It's just a wacky story told in sharp, highly evolved prose with tons of most excellent detail (like the list of things Awesome ate before going into hibernation, which included 200 gallons of bechamel sauce and a box of Froot Loops.)

This book was creative in the same way someone who pees on a canvas is creative. The book was painfully silly and self-indulgent. Not too mention the prose was boringly repetitive and the descriptions of the main character were inconsistent. This is coming from someone who loves Sherman Alexie, and Latin American surrealism. However this was one big disappointment. I'm only giving it 2 stars because it was vaguely creative as I mentioned. Maybe next I'll go see what the 8th graders in a local middle school writing class are up to.