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Emotionally Weird
Kate Atkinson. Picador USA: 2001 (paperback). ISBN: 031227999X. 355 pages.
Guide not available
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"Emotionally weird, intellectually weird, verbally weird, but enormously
entertaining." If we were famous critics, we hope that Kate Atkinson's publisher would borrow these words to promote
Atkinson's great new novel, a tale of mysterious family trauma and academic insanity set in 1970s Scotland. Twenty-one year
old Effie Stuart-Murphy and her mother Nora, who is allegedly still a virgin, are sequestered in the family's crumbling
ancestral island home, telling stories. Effie is having a hard time getting her mother to tell the story that she really
wants to hear, the story that will reveal the identity of her real father. Nora is equally impatient with her daughter's
account of her life at college, and frequently offers suggestions for ways that Effie might spice up her narrative and get
to the good stuff. As readers, we get all the melodramatic pleasure of following Nora's dark, gothic story of twisted family
values, but we also get all the tear-wiping pleasure (if you cry when you laugh too hard) of discovering the decidedly
quirky characters who surround Nora at university. This novel is a wolf in sheep's clothing; a sophisticated examination of
the fluctuating power of language disguised as a cryptic, hilarious yarn. Ordinarily, we wouldn't use the word "yarn," but
somehow, it just seems to fit. We just discovered Kate Atkinson, and we're going to go find anything else that she ever
wrote and read it right this minute, once we've recovered our composure.
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