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Billy and Girl


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Darkly comic and more than a little disturbing, Billy and Girl introduces a version of childhood trauma that is completely original and utterly unnerving. Abandoned years ago by their parents, Billy and Girl live alone somewhere in England. Girl looks for their mother by going door-to-door and addressing every woman who answers as "Mom" and Billy fantasizes about a future in which he will be famous—preferably in the United States—as a movie star, a psychiatrist, a doctor to blonds with breast enlargements, or the author of Billy England's Book of Pain. The siblings support and torture each other, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they hope will be better, but managing to prolong nightmares as they create alternate personalities in order to survive and conquer and punish.

Details

ISBN-10 1-56478-202-6
ISBN-13 9781564782021
Publication Date Jun 1999
Nb of pages 192
Dimensions 5.5 x 8 in.

Reviews

Press Reviews

London Times
Deborah Levy's talent is quirky and exact. She likes to weigh the fantastic with the matter of fact. Each sentence of hers is a surprise, dislocated from the previous one. Sudden laughter is provoked by the unexpected, two sentences so awry that they become absurd.

Publishers Weekly
This darkly humourous, surrealistic rendering of a primal family drama is also an unsettling postmodern portrait of the hurt and rage of adolescence . . . Though erupting anger dissolves into, or is
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Times Literary Supplement
Levy is consistently striking and successful when reinterpreting and creating new contexts for literary and dramatic ideas.

The Times (London)
Levy's work represents an impressive stylistic achievement, tapping I believe at the door of that unrepressedly 'feminine' prose-style which Virginia Woolf anticipated and coveted.

CNN.com
Carefully avoiding the exploitative or trivializing nature of current talk-show therapy, Levy introduces a cast of characters whose pasts are at once sordid and intriguing . . . That Levy is able
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Booklist
Picture Judy Blume meets William Golding . . . An excellent, entertaining selection.

Boston Book Review
[The events of the novel] take place as though partly within the frames of a cartoon; class rage and consumer lust lend the portraits a biting satiric edge, while a morbid but vital humor saves
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Voice Literary Supplement
Comic. Absurd, and always tinged with tragedy, Billy and Girl reads at times like a cross between Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Beth Nugent's City of Boys. It is
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San Francisco Chronicle
The novel achieves a fractured, surreal logic. . . .Levy manages to find poignant elements among the debris of Billy and Girl's lives . . . She gives the siblings remarkable insight and a surprising, cracked sense of humor . . . Levy's family psychodrama is like a minty-fresh acid bath.

Rain Taxi
Levy carefully contrasts the brutal mess of Billy and Girl's life with a clean, meaningless exterior world . . . While this banal side of England buzzes around them, Billy and Girl's myths of
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Genres : Fiction : Europe : British and Irish
Countries : England


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