Barker is one of those writers whom you either love or hate, but
she's also one of the few contemporary British authors with a
completely distinctive style. Each of her novels is peopled with
increasingly dysfunctional characters - her gift lies in making you
empathise with these hopeless cases, rather than in marvelling at
their grotesqueness. Heroine and narrator Medve is a case in point.
The blurb on the jacket draws comparisons with The Catcher in the
Rye and, indeed, Barker does the teenage angst thing rather well,
and teenage angst is something Medve has in spades. To begin with,
she's afflicted with gigantism, an outrageously peculiar family and
all the attendant problems of emerging sexuality. Throw into the
equation the arrival of La Roux, an unsavoury South African former
soldier, and the scene is set for something approaching a romantic
liaison. But, this being Nicola Barker, nothing is ever
straightforward and first La Roux must contend with the other
members of the family - the young brother with an erotic fixation
on the death scene in Black Beauty; the father with an obsession
with raw food and chewing; the absent mother with a desire to
patent an effective anal probe to be used by the American prison
service. Barker is an original - and a taste that's probably well
worth acquiring. (Kirkus UK)
In the summer of 1981, a six-foot-three giantess named Medve, built
like a shire horse, is residing with her abnormally short family in
an almost derelict art deco hotel on an island off the South Devon
coast. Then a ginger stranger arrives, stinking of antiseptic.
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