Girl's Vore

by Poppi Pumpkin

There are truly underground connections between psychiatric hospitals. The writer uses knowledge of this to create a surreal backdrop for a gripping fictionalized reality.

205 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 19, 2017

Reviews

[David Moncoeur · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's so real, it has aspects that sound unreal.....the heroine, Nooshie, a live-in nurse, is given a bunch of hacked out sea containers to live & sleep in by her secretive NHS authorities.....then when with an ex-girlfriend, sitting talking in real life, because she is now involved in housing, she told me ".....they're giving people sea containers to live in these days, it's so bad....." I said nothing to her about this Girl's Vore story development, but over the months since she said that....it makes it seem like the whole book is probably truth-referential, but the writer can easily count on it not being very believable.
I agree with another review, that the Comedy Award of last year resulted in people feeling the awarded stories weren't funny enough, "laugh out loud funny"......well....I agree.....this is quite a funny story with a funny character, and I did laugh out loud......and hardly anybody's heard of it. I think it could be a stand-alone success......like you only think of Catch-22 when you think of Joseph Heller.....there also could not be much more than this book, even if she did something else, it wouldn't be this good....as if "Poppy" emptied her head out of every NHS secret she could think of, & wondered out loud whether she should have ~ the heroine says, "I think there should be some secrets....."

[Gilles Achache · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend downloaded this story into her smartphone, we were camping in the south of England....it is a novella of 100-odd pages - she handed it round her fellow campers, me being one of them, the story showing on her phone.....each person started 'laughing out loud' ....the fact that, recently in the news, there was reference to few stories (up for the literary Comedy Prize) genuinely making people 'laugh out loud' caused me to want to mention this on goodreads......
The I of the story is a nurse whose speciality is knowledge of underground tunnels secretly connecting hospitals, with London being described as having the most sophisticated of these tunnel systems - she wheels an extremely dangerous type of psychiatric patient, strapped to a wheelchair, with two other nurses, along to a tube train....in a London underground that is deeper down than the underground that Londoners are familiar with. But he simply gets wheeled along to a hospital you or I would be taken to for an operation, & operated on with full rights as a human being, there's no explosion of violence, which is a bit spoilery of me.....this is not a horror story, or even a thriller....then there is the characterisation. God knows if this will eventually go down in literary history, or herstory.
This is probably what had people suddenly spluttering their camp muesli / porridge / biscuits about the campsite fire.....this tunnels nurse....is gay, & likes to imagine being swallowed by the girls she falls in love with. Hattie, one of the other two nurses accompanying Noosh to the secret tube station, for instance.... ".....has a nice throat.....nice to imagine sliding down it....." ....the plot development arising from that ~ another campsite girl said of this ~~~~ "I aaaabsolutely llllloved that. I genuinely thought it was brilliantly done!"
To describe that is too much of a spoiler, & possibly to build expectations over such a random choice, could be damagingly anti-climax like, which is uncool psychologically. Enough said.