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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: A Novel by [Tom Robbins]

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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Tom Robbins (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 849 ratings

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“This is one of those special novels—a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and sane.”—Thomas Pynchon

The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all.

Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Bantam
Publication date

June 17, 2003
File size

789 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is one of those special novels—a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and sane—that you just want to ride off into the sunset with.”–Thomas Pynchon

“The best fiction, so far, to come out of the American counterculture.”—Chicago Tribune Book World

“Even Cowgirls Get the Blues comes as a magical gift, a brilliant affirmation of private visions and private wishes and their power to transform life and death.”—The Nation

From the Back Cover

"This is one of those special novels--a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and san--that you just want to ride off into the sunset with."--Thomas Pynchon

"The best fiction, so far, to come out of the American counterculture."--Chicago Tribune Book World

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From AudioFile

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is perhaps the ultimate love story. In the hands of master author Tom Robbins, love is found throughout the book; all its main characters devoutly believe in or eventually achieve love's magic. But it is the heroine, Sissy Hawkshaw, for whom love is always present in two distinct forms. With Michael Nouri's narration, Robbins's intelligently wacky credo of love is as wild a success as the last flock of whooping cranes found in the novel. Nouri's decision not to soften his voice for Sissy's lines is an interesting choice (as many male readers do to portray females). There are soft moments in the story, which he reads appropriately, but all in all, Sissy's voice is his own. The result is a smooth, all-encompassing reading that allows listeners to be fully absorbed. Many characters have a vital influence in this novel, and Michael Nouri does a superb job bringing each to life without straying too far from his own personal voice. Listeners couldn't ask for a better guide through Tom Robbins's adventures in love. R.A.P (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Tom Robbins has been called “a vital natural resource” by The Oregonian, “one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world” by the Financial Times of London, and “the most dangerous writer in the world today” by Fernanda Pivano of Italy’s Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

Starring Sissy Hanshaw--flawlessly beautiful, almost. A small-town girl with big-time dreams and a quirk to match--hitchhiking her way into your heart, your hopes, and your sleeping bags...
Featuring Bonanza Jellybean and the smooth-riding cowgirls of Rubber Rose Ranch. Chink, lascivious guru of yams and yang. Julian, Mohawk by birth; asthmatic esthete and husband by disposition. Dr. Robbins, preventive psychiatrist and reality instructor...
Follow Sissy's amazing odyssey from Virginia to chic Manhattan to the Dakota Badlands, where FBI agents, cowgirls, and ecstatic whooping cranes explode in a deliciously drawn-out climax... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Welcome to the Rubber Rose Ranch

It is the finest outhouse in the Dakotas.  It has to be.

Spiders, mice, cold drafts, splinters, corncobs, habitual stenches don't make it in this company.  The hands have renovated and decorated the privy themselves.  Foam rubber, hanging flower pots, a couple of prints by Georgia O'Keeffe (her cow skull period), fluffy carpeting, Sheetrock insulation, ashtrays, and incense burner, a fly strip, a photograph of Dale Evans about which there is some controversy.  There is even a radio in the outhouse, although the radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas.

Of course, the ranch has indoor facilities, flush toilets in regular bathrooms, but they'd been stopped up during the revolution and nobody had ever unstopped them. Plumbing was one thing the girls were poor at.  Nearest Roto-Rooter man was thirty miles.  Weren't any Roto-Rooter women anywhere, as far as they knew.

Jelly is sitting in the outhouse.  She has been sitting there longer than necessary.  The door is wide open and lets in the sky.  Or, rather, a piece of the sky, for on a summer's day in Dakota the sky is mighty big.  Mighty big and mighty blue, and today there is hardly a cloud.  What looks to be a wisp of a cloud is actually the moon, narrow and pale, like a paring snipped from a snowman's toenail.  The radio is broadcasting "The Silver Dollar Polka."

What is young Jelly thinking, in such a pensive pose?  Hard to say.  Probably she is thinking about the birds.  No, not those crows that just haiku-ed by, but the birds she and her hands are bamboozling down at the lake.  Those birds give a body something to think about, all right.  But maybe she is thinking about the Chink, wondering what the crazy old coot is up to now, way up yonder on his ridge.  Maybe she is thinking about ranchly finances, puzzling how she's going to make ends meet.  It is even possible that she is pondering something metaphysical, for the Chink has more than once subjected her to philosophical notions; the hit and miss of the cosmic pumpkin.  If that is unlikely, it is still less likely that she is mulling over the international situation--desperate, as usual.  And apparently her mind is not on romance or a particular romantic entity, for though her panties and jeans are at her feet, her fingers drum dryly upon the domes of her knees.  Perhaps Jelly is thinking about what's for supper.

On the other hand, Bonanza Jellybean, ranch boss, may just be looking things over.  Surveying the spread from the comfort of the privy.  Checking out the corrals, the stables, the bunkhouse, the pump, what's left of the sauna, the ruins of the reducing salon, the willow grove and the cottonwoods, the garden where Dolores teased a rattlesnake on Monday, the pile of hairdryers still rusting among the sunflowers, the chicken coop, the tumbleweed, the peyote wagon, the distant buttes and canyons, the sky full of blue.  Weather's hot, but there's a breeze today and it feels sweet, swimming up her bare thighs.  There is sage smell and rose waft.  There is fly buzz and polka yip.  Way off, horse lips flutter; she hears the goats at pasture and the far, faint sounds of the girls tending their herd.  The bird herd.

A rooster clears his sinuses.  He's loud but absolutely nothing compared to what those birds can do if the hands don't keep them quiet.  They'd better!

Still sitting, Jelly focuses her dreamy gaze on the rooster.  "Someday," she says to the empty seat next to her, "if that Sissy Hankshaw ever shows up here again, I'm gonna teach her how to hypnotize a chicken.  Chickens are the easiest creatures on earth to hypnotize.  If you can look a chicken in the eyes for ten seconds, it's yours forever."

She pulls up her pants, shoulders her rifle and ambles off to relieve the guards at the gate.

Welcome to the Rubber Rose.  The largest all-girl ranch in the West. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FBFNVA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam; Reissue edition (June 17, 2003)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 17, 2003
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 789 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 055334949X

Best Sellers Rank: #282,111 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #170 in Literary Satire Fiction
- #364 in Humorous Literary Fiction
- #1,466 in Women's Adventure Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 849 ratings

About the author

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Tom Robbins

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Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American author. His best-selling novels are "seriocomedies" (also known as "comedy-drama"), often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from carefully researched bizarre facts. His novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was made into a movie in 1993 by Gus Van Sant and stars Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

849 global ratings

5 star		70%
4 star		15%
3 star		8%
2 star		4%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Entertaining, Creative, Shocking Even

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 5, 2022

Verified Purchase

This book will keep your interest. That's for sure. Not plot-wise so much. But everything else wise. There is creative stuff all over. Some of the anthropomorphisms while originally creative, after a while, kind of "nah, save it for when it would really work, not every time do you have to anthropomorphize every thing." There are lots of post-modernism tricks (even though written rather longer ago). The author referring to his writing and so forth. And some passages seem X-rated. Not quite tittillating, but the language. And what the author wrote. X-rated more in attitudes than descriptions of the doings, I guess you could say. But that stuff was always intriguing and not as over-done as the anthropomorphisms, or the thumbs stuff. The uniqueness of the thumb and so on was good. In fact there is science as well as a descent amount of philosophy in the book. The latter though, you have to decide what is truly insightful versus that which takes up rather too much reading time for what there is to deliver.

Well, I seem to have mentioned more negatives than seems fitting for a 5-star rating. There's no other book I've ever seen like this. That is for sure. It is that different. There is no need to have seen the movie (which doesn't help anything). And parts you don't like (such as the Countess's teeth making noise descriptions, or thumbs again and again, well they are easily skipped).

This book is fully enjoyable. And so very different. You are guaranteed a very interesting reading experience.

One person found this helpful

Kindle Customer

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 26, 2023

Verified Purchase

I read read this book when it first came out and really didn't appreciate the underlying playfulness of it. I see this now a lot like Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring". Designed to upset ideas and trains of thought but with a playful and benevolent purpose. As I said, fun.

Timeless Masterpiece

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 3, 2023

Verified Purchase

Such a joy to revisit this book 30 yrs since first read it. Enjoying it more 3 decades later.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 23, 2022

Verified Purchase

It’s been many years but still as delightfully humorous as the first time. A funny, insightful and enlightening insight into spiritual reality.

Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 16, 2020

Verified Purchase

Freedom or happiness? Good question. Lots of entertainment and philosophy from the author. I enjoyed the adventures of Sissy with the big thumbs who was born to hitchhike. The story bogged down in Part IV with a long discussion with the psychiatrist, Dr. Robbins. Eventually, Part IV had a good conclusion and the book ended in Part VII with more entertainment and philosophy. This was a good read taking into account the cast of interesting characters and the story. Great quotes throughout the book. What should a person do who is unique but is a freak? It is hard to know unless you are in their shoes and this book puts you in Sissy's shoes.

One person found this helpful

If you haven't read Tom Robbins, now would be a good time to start.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 18, 2022

Verified Purchase

All of his books are both entertaining and eye opening - sometimes in surprising ways.

One person found this helpful

Aalok Devendra Shah

Freedom and magic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 15, 2019

Verified Purchase

Take what u believe, masticate on it while toasting marshmallows, drinking red wine, and dreaming about brie cheese baguettes, throw it all in a blender and come out smiling and more brilliant having read a book with 2.2 million commas and crazy grammatical tricks to make sentences and descriptions last a sponge's lifetime (they live forever because they bud a generic copy of themselves which is the same then so they are always the same)... Oh god, my sentence has almost done the same- oh god, Mr Robbins has so afflicted (blessed? Bestowed? Bemused (I like it because it evokes both laughter and a Muse)) me!

16 people found this helpful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 1, 2021

Verified Purchase

It wasn't the same cover which was disappointing because that's the cover I wanted for my collection but over all the book is in ok condition

Top reviews from other countries

trevor hubbert

Great service.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 27, 2020

Verified Purchase

Ordered on Prime, came on stated day. All good.

Amazon Customer

Just… read it!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is a re-read for me. Enjoying it even more the second time around. You really can't go wrong with Tom Robbins!

One person found this helpful

KH2014

Original, scintillating, thought-provoking as ever

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

For anyone who has not yet read Robbins, a treat in store. For those like me revisiting him, the second read is every bit as much fun as the first and not many writers can do that.

One person found this helpful

David Partridge

Great service..

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

Great service..great price for v-good quality book..

RDB.

A mistake.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

Not for me.

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