Customer Reviews

Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac

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Up front disclaimer: I am a good personal friend of the author. Anyway, I'll write this on the assumption that you'll trust what I say is honest regardless.

Lurvy is Hal's best novel, and not only is it relatively good compared to his others, it's good on any standard scale. It's a rewriting of E.B. White's marvelous Charlotte's Web, but just about as different as can be. The style is very experimental: quirky, visceral prose that's often more train of thought than plot oriented; giving way on occasion to passages that are in cartoon format; and other maneuvers. Probably that sounds like an unlikely mixture to succeed, but it did (for me, at least, and much as I like Hal as a friend and a writer, not all his writing does). The book successfully creates a dark and emotionally forbidding atmosphere and puts a mildly hallucinogenic lining on the clouds.

Do you like to pooh-pooh the "mainstream"? Would you go see a punk band that you'd never heard before? Well, don't chicken out now. This novel is right up your alley -- plus it's from a cool little indy publisher in Toronto.