Author: Jaimy Gordon
File Type: epub
A Los Angeles Times Best Book or the YearNational Book Award Winner Jaimy Gordons bold and daring coming of age novel combines the teenaged angst of Catcher in the Rye with the humor and tragedy of Girl, Interrupted. Ursie Koderer knows herself to be a monster--doomed to be different from other girls--very different. When shes discovered cutting herself at camp, she goes AWOL, and lands in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital. Ursie, now known as the Bogeywoman, joins up with the other misfits on the adolescent ward. They start a bughouse rock group, steal a nitrous oxide machine. As a mental patient Ursie is a success. But then shes implicated in the accidental burning of a friend. Locked away, the Bogeywoman meets the beautiful, mysterious Doctor Zuk, a woman psychiatrist from somewhere east of the Urals. Their affair is the main event in this gorgeous novel of love, crime, liberation, and flight to something like a new world.From Publishers WeeklyFunny and creative, a playful and intelligent addition to the coming-out genre, this is a highly entertaining novel from Gordon (She Drove Without Stopping). Narrator Ursula Koderer, the self-described bogeywoman of the title, has a troubling tendency to fall in lust and love with girlgoyles, those alluring creatures with luscious round bumps instead of icky frog danglies. Ursula starts her story at age 16, at her beloved Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls, where she yearns for the girlgoyle Lou Rae Greenrule. After an unplanned expedition off camp grounds with Lou Rae gets Ursula in big trouble, her TV-personality father sends her to an expensive Baltimore mental hospital. There the team of dreambox mechanics (psychiatrists) includes one Madame Zuk with whom Ursula falls instantly, complexly and curatively in love. Much of the rest of the novel takes place in and around what Ursula calls the bughouse, where Ursulas desperately rebellious tacticsAseducing, stealing equipment, contriving to form a musical groupAmake a perfect fit for the jubilant fireworks of her narrative voice Then I heard an exotic familiar squinch, and taking my chin to the floor I saw... the silver sandals of Doctor Zuk.... I heard, illegibly vibrating, the low tobacco-cured c-string of her voice. She was sort of crooning sumpm. My heart drowned. Bits of Gordons verbal technique evoke Ulysses, Lolita, Salinger, David Foster Wallace and Jeanette Winterson, but she sounds like none of these for long her concatenation of surprising events, her intoxicatingly unhinged prose style and her get-down-and-roll-in-the-mud passion for language make this an extraordinary piece of fiction. (Sept.) 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalUrsie Koderer, a.k.a. Bogeywoman, tests her mettle for nine years at Camp Chunkagunk, aptly nicknamed Tough Paradise for Girls. Besides the usual swimming and crafts, Bogeywoman cultivates other hobbies following animal tracks and cutting up her inner arms and wrists. As she begins to endure the crushes of adolescence, in her case on other girls, she becomes even bolder. When she and a friend decide to hike beyond the camps boundaries, Bogeywoman is whisked away to a mental hospital, where the psychiatrists, referred to as dreambox mechanics, plumb the depths of her maladjustment. She clams up for months at a time, preferring her own counsel and living by her wits. Audacious Bogeywoman brings to mind the heroine of Blanche McCrary Boyds The Redneck Way of Knowledge (LJ 51582) and Molly Bolt in Rita Mae Browns Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). This coming-of-age tale features explicit language and, beyond that, a vernacular unto itself. Gordons third novel is not for timid readers.ALisa S. Nussbaum, Euclid P.L., OH 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.