The only book I've ever read that was written in the second person. For that alone it is worth reading. ( )

strange, Sirius, frogs, seems to need sequel

There's no comparing Robbins to other writers - his maniacal poetic style can hypnotize or it can irritate but it cannot leave indifferent. He flirts with magic realism in this novel: characters being not only eccentric but spiritually inclined enough to defy Earth's physics. What I love most, however, is Robbin's ability to pull from myths, legends, observations and general arcana which he weaves into perfect logic - even if the resulting tapestry is a bit gaudy and very unique. Robbins at his best. ( )

“Don’t make you laugh.”

This may not seem like a great line. The fact that this entire novel is written in second person makes this line genius. I’m not sure if this book had to be written in this POV, but it sure as hell makes it interesting. Instructive, too; especially since this is one of two works I’m reading as preparation for my own second-person novella.

This thing is rife with simile. I can’t remember saying that about anything else. Sure, I’ve read novels that used simile as a crutch, but Mr. Robbins dipped that implement in lead and swung it crushing to every clause with or without a purpose. It’s almost like when you trip in a pun marathon and can’t stop scraping your bloody knees along the Tartan track—you just keep on the fuck punning for the fun of it. A compulsion, maybe, that can only tire itself with endless invention. Putting brass tacks on the track only speeds up the process. And all this writer’s similes could turn smiling gurus into frowning nuns if it weren’t for the shear bombast, originality, and dedication at being the best similesmith in the smiling and frowning universe. It’s kind of exhausting and kind of exhilarating, but surely unique in a way that pangolins are unique (whether punning with those superlong tongues or not).

This . . . boy, it had a lot in it. Like a tick filled to full tension and seeking another bloated tick with which to grasp, rub, and burst those fat bodies into an ectoparasitic constellation. (𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵 kind of simile, see?) What seemed frivolous yet fun at first mutated into profound and fun. I don’t give a pangolin shit for the stock market, and yet I couldn’t stop reading about this materialist protagonist as she grappled with her burgeoning sexuality, the Sirius star system, the Bozo and Dogon peoples, and all things amphibian. All with a thieving monkey and a jade enema? Come on, this kind of thing is a typical Tuesday for my imagination, and I love, love, love that someone else out there bothered to rip that imagery from their own brain and put it into mass-printing production.

This, finally though, while entertaining and illuminating . . . did it need to be in second person? Does it matter either way? With fiction this freakish and fractious, who cares? I got what I needed from it—both technically and personally—and I’m not one to parse the difference between toads and frogs. But maybe 𝘺𝘰𝘶 are?

Don’t make me laugh.

“We, with our propensity for murder, torture, slavery, rape, cannibalism, pillage, advertising jingles, shag carpets, and golf, how could we be seriously considered as the perfection of a four-billion-year-old grandiose experiment? Perhaps as a race, we have evolved as far as we are capable, yet that by no means suggests that evolution has called it quits. In all likelihood, it has something beyond human on the drawing board. We tend to refer to our most barbaric and crapulous behavior as ‘inhuman,’ whereas, in point of fact, it is exactly human, definitively and quintessentially human, since no other creature habitually indulges in comparable atrocities. This negates neither our occasional virtues nor our aesthetic triumphs, but if a being at least a little bit more than human is not waiting around the bend of time, then evolution has suffered a premature ejaculation.” ( )

A very enjoyable book. I truly liked all the characters. I really wish Tom Robbins wrote more frequently -- perhaps his books wouldn't be as good if he did though. A great condemnation of Late 20th Century materialism. ( )