Geek Love in Around the Year in 52 Books

Oct 18, 2013 Katie rated it it was ok

2.5 stars. All of the 2.5 stars are for a great idea and good prose.

I'm a child of the internet and I'm pretty weathered in the "things that shock me" department, so my rating isn't really a commentary on how fucked up the plot is. There were some eyebrow-raising parts, but nothing that I couldn't power through.

As a primer, in Geek Love we're taken through the life and times of Olympia "Oly" Binewski, who now goes by Olympia McGurk, an albino hunchback dwarf who spent her entire childhood in a t 2.5 stars. All of the 2.5 stars are for a great idea and good prose.

I'm a child of the internet and I'm pretty weathered in the "things that shock me" department, so my rating isn't really a commentary on how fucked up the plot is. There were some eyebrow-raising parts, but nothing that I couldn't power through.

As a primer, in Geek Love we're taken through the life and times of Olympia "Oly" Binewski, who now goes by Olympia McGurk, an albino hunchback dwarf who spent her entire childhood in a traveling circus/freak show ("fabulon" is what it's called in the book, and I apologize because I don't really know what to call it) run by her parents, Aloysius and Lily. And that's about the most basic, tame part of the whole book. It's a ride from start to finish. Oly has a number of siblings, all of whom were intentionally engineered to be born abnormally by Al and Lil, who experimented through each of Lil's many pregnancies with various combinations of drugs designed to produce unusual offspring.

This can all pretty much be found in any summary of this book. Goodreads's summary also includes this information, and this is where Dunn (or the jacket copy writer) loses me: "Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene."

So here's the thing. I think a book of this type really does have the potential to say something, or many things, about able bodies, societal standards of beauty, self-image, bioethics, religion, and normativity. Seriously, all of that! Yeah, it definitely does. But this book doesn't say any of it.

We as readers spend pretty much no time on the ethical implications of the decisions made in this book to intentionally deform children, so much so that I assume we're not supposed to empathize with the idea. And yet... the Binewski kids love their deformities, derisively call others "norms," and emphatically believe that they would not choose to be born "normal" if given the choice. We also see (view spoiler) I struggle to see the larger picture. I want books to shine some light on dark, ugly corners of society, and to me, this book just creeps into dark, ugly corners without telling me why we're there (besides to creep me out).

I also had real problems with the pacing, which is why I specified above that the prose was good but didn't say "the writing." For the first third of the book, we're keeping pace evenly with the past (time in the circus) and the future (Oly is 39 and living in "regular society" in Portland). Gradually, this goes wonky until we get a crazy long stint of past time toward the end of the book, followed by a short denouement in the present, followed by the end of the book. I was really captivated by the long stint of past time--it contains the rising action and climax--but it didn't work for me given the layout of the first part of the book, even though it did retain my attention. The climax itself, which I won't spoil, was also very briefly described and disappointing for something that's such a big deal. ...more

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Dec 22, 2018 Ruth rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychological-mental-issues, revenge, contemporary-gritty-fiction, death, own, the-book-addicts-reading-challenge, full-deck-book-vipers-challenge, 2015-bingo-challenge-all-about-boo, eerie-creepy-dark, coming-of-age

Up to the last 100 pages I thought this book was boring. However I enjoyed the end of it and I might re-read it again at some stage to see if it reads better the second time around.

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