Geek Love

This book is beautiful and horrible. Mostly, I think, due to Dunn's writing style, which is gorgeous and lush and always stays just on the good side of precious.

I'm not really sure what I want to say about this book, because I sort of fell into it like a black hole and couldn't really think about it until I got out of it. I didn't hate all the characters like some other reviewers. I'm pretty fond of almost all of them, actually. Even Al and Lil, who deliberately mutated their children for profit. Their travelling circus was an alternate world where diversity in body layout was celebrated and not shamed, and in that it was surprisingly nice. Of course, there was a lot of other emotional manipulation going on which was dark and terrible but some of the ways that Olympia described having to live in the world after leaving the circus really made it clear that she lived without prejudice because of how she looked. Lil's obvious love for all her children kind of broke my heart. The inside of her head must be so beautiful. She has an idyllic version of her life in which she and her husband didn't create their children in order to sell their bodies for profit, in which her son isn't a megalomaniac, in which the real world is as tolerant as the travelling circus community, in which her family is happy forever. I wish these things were true, for her.

So I obviously loved this book because I'm into grotesque imagery and mad science. Doc P and Miss Lick were some of the more interesting characters to me. Miss Lick has such an interestingly skewed worldview; while I disagree with what she's doing, I'm not sure I necessarily do within the book world. I'd love to read her notes and journals.

As great and terrible as I found this book though, I'm reading it as a person who doesn't have a disability. While I liked how their microcosm of the circus allowed Olympia to be so matter-of-fact about her appearance and the everyday life of living without limbs or joined to your sister or with a hump, there's definitely a sense of “freak show” voyeurism in reading this book.