Poppy Shakespeare [Paperback]

Clare Allen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 5, 2007

Who is mad? Who is sane? Who decides? Welcome to the Dorothy Fish, a hospital in North London. N has been a patient for thirteen years. Day after day she sits smoking in the common room and swapping medication. Like the other patients, N's ambition is never to be discharged. Then in walks Poppy Shakespeare in a short skirt and snakeskin heels. Poppy is certain she isn't mentally ill and desperate to return to her life outside and, though baffled, N agrees to help her. But in a world where everything's upside down, are they crazy enough to upset the system?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The line between sanity and lunacy blurs in this ironic debut novel, a British import whose obvious inspiration is Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The narrator is "N," a female patient in a London mental institution, a self-described "dribbler" whose "mum was a dribbler and her mum as well 'cept she never seen her hardly, grown up in a home while they scooped out bits of her mother's brain, like a tater." N, a 13-year veteran of the hospital, is charged with taking the newest patient under her wing, the eponymous Poppy, who insists there's absolutely nothing wrong with her. But Poppy soon confronts the legal bureaucracy of the mental health system and learns that in this Alice-in-Wonderland, off-kilter world she will have to feign madness before can prove herself sane. Is Poppy deluded or is government bureaucracy the source of society's ills? And are we, the people, mad for giving government the power to label us as insane or sane in the first place? Readers must navigate a working class British dialect as well as specifics about the British mental health system. But those who hang on for this often painfully funny, difficult ride will gain insight about love, friendship and human nature that only a crazy person can properly articulate.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

In this darkly funny, excruciating first novel, N, who has been a patient at a London mental hospital for thirteen years, plays Virgil to Poppy Shakespeare, a sometimes manic single mother, who claims that she has been mistakenly committed. Allan's brash conceit is that N teaches Poppy how to act crazy so that she can be assessed, cured, and released; Poppy duly begins gnawing her fingertips and muttering. Allan's triumph, though, is pure voice: N's loopy, dead-on rants—about the vagaries of the system, her unspeakable childhood, and the other patients, whom she calls "dribblers"—blur the line between the mad and the sane, and express how the disenfranchised experience authority.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks (March 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747585849
• ISBN-13: 978-0747585848
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,097,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars worth it, May 30, 2006

By 

Jac (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poppy Shakespeare: A Novel (Hardcover)

Clare Allan's book requires patience for the American reader, to be sure. But if you read aloud as you go along this novel will blow you away with its humor, its doozy characters and take on the mentality inside mental institutions - which is certainly the same the world over. I dare anyone who says they love literature to give this one a go!

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A comical look at mental illness., September 7, 2010

By 

Toucan Shan "Boo" (Indiana) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Poppy Shakespeare (Paperback)

I loved this book. It's for anyone who ever thought they might be crazy or ever had a drug problem. I liked it better than "A million little pieces" by James Frey, but not as much as "One flew over the Cuckoo's nest" by Ken Kesey.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been a three star, January 5, 2009

By 

Rebecca N. Phillips - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poppy Shakespeare (Paperback)

The first two chapters contained a lot of swearing without really adding any character to the book - it was like she did it to prove she could. However after this the swearing died down (was still there but added to the character). I nearly gave it a three, except for the ending which was very disappointing - not so much the actual events in the end but that it just eneded.

Its narrated by N and takes place in a day pyshiatric clinic. N comes from a long line of family members having mental health issues and them commiting suicide, and has been at the clinic for over a decade. Then Poppy comes along (the title of the book) being made to go to the day clinic after some bazar job training interviews and wants N to help prove that she's not mad. N however can't understand why anyone would want to leave the clinic and meanwhile tries to "help" her new fiend only for it to be made worse.

In the end it was the ending that dispappointed me and steered me towards the 2 stars instead of 3