Customer Reviews

Girl Factory

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

 

 

Girl Factory is a brilliant novel by one of America's most undiscovered literary geniuses. It is wonderfully funny, and disturbing in all the best ways. I haven't read a single other book that took me to the extremes of laughing out loud and sadness in such a short novel. Read it!

A guy walks into a yogurt parlor at his local mall and finds Steve Martin on duty. If you could channel the latter's brain as he recorded his dreams in a way that explained life and death and chance while he was reading a Japanese comic book, then you might--just might--begin to sense the funny/sad/bittersweet/surreal world of Jonathan, the kind and earnest narrator of Jim Krusoe's liberating and original new novel, Girl Factory.

Author Jim Krusoe serves up another literary knuckleball with "Girl Factory," an entertaining and darkly comic novel. In "Factory," the altruistic Jonathan uses his misguided common sense and good intentions to wreak havoc in the fictional town of St. Nils, with a few memorable detours along the way. Krusoe is inventive in style and structure in this hilarious and thought provoking work. Readers will also enjoy his first novel, "Iceland."

I guess I'm too much of a literalist to really love this book. I got a kick out of some of it, I had great hope for the story early on, and I felt a sort of sympathy for the main character who is kind of a regular guy, smart in some ways, dense and naive in others and just kind of grinding out a regular, unremarkable, dull existence. An so, since the story really goes nowhere, I guess I'm trying hard right now to tell my professor of literature what the author is trying to tell us here.

Is he saying how bizarre life is, how regular people fall into traps that can get them in trouble? Is he trying to show us how random and meaningless life really is? I guess you'll have to figure it out for yourself.

Still, I enjoyed reading it like I would an extra long and readable short story and yet as hard as I try, I didn't find anything too profound or excellent about the book like others have.