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Cruddy
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
31 posts | 20 read | 43 to read
On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping two of the 127 hits of acid found in a friend's shoe, a sixteen-year-old who is grounded for a year curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom, picks up a pen, and begins to write. Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe. The cruddy girl named Roberta was writing the cruddy book of her cruddy life and the name of the book was called Cruddy. Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood. She could not give the authorities any information about why she was the only survivor and everyone else was lying around in hacked-up pieces. Roberta Rohbeson, 1971. Her overblown, drug-induced teenage rant against a world bounded by "the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road behind cruddy Black Cat Lumber" soon becomes a detailed account of another story. It is a story about which Roberta has kept silent for five years, until, under the influence of a pale hippie called the Turtle and a drug called Creeper, her tale giddily unspools... Roberta Rohbeson, 1967. The world of Roberta, age eleven, is terrifyingly unbounded, a one-way cross-country road trip fueled by revenge and by greed, a violent, hallucinatory, sometimes funny, more often horrific year of killings, betrayals, arson, and a sinister set of butcher knives, each with its own name. Welcome to Cruddy, Lynda Barry's masterful tale of the two intertwined narratives set five years -- an eternity -- apart, which form the backbone of Roberta's life. Cruddy is a wild ride indeed, a fairy tale-cum-low-budget horror movie populated by a cast of characters that will remain vivid in the reader's mind long after the final page: Roberta's father, a dangerous alcoholic and out-of-work meat cutter in search of his swindled inheritance; the frightening owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar and sometime slaughterhouse; and two charming but quite mad escapees from the Barbara V. Herrmann Home for Adolescent Rest. Written with a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Roberta's two stories -- part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz -- painfully but inevitably converge in a surprising denouement in a nightmarish Dreamland in the Nevada desert. By turns terrifying, darkly funny, and resonant with humanity, propelled by all the narrative power of a superior thriller and burnished by the author's pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.
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Leftcoastzen
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Eggs Yay👏🏻👏🏻 1y
39 likes1 comment
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Leftcoastzen
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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#falltreasures #faceoncover Love her art ! It was a weird story as I recall ….

Eggs Perfect 👌🏼 3y
42 likes1 comment
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Leftcoastzen
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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#7days7covers #covercrush
If anyone wants to play please join in.The people I keep wanting to tag I think are already playing.😀
1 cover everyday for 7 days.No explanation needed .

batsy Compelling! Her style is so distinctive. 5y
cathipink Such a great book. 5y
46 likes2 comments
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Bertha_Mason
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry

"Whispers through a microphone can be so horrifying."

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Bertha_Mason
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry

"And although she was an evil fungus growing on 200 pounds of irritated lard, her feelings were real. It wasn't her fault that the father wandered into her life. Chance blew the father in a lot of directions. He rolled around this way and he rolled around that way, deforming everything he brushed up against."

batsy The writing sounds amazing based on the quotes you've posted! 6y
Bertha_Mason It is! I love the way the protagonist sees the world. 6y
4 likes2 comments
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Bertha_Mason
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry

"And when the train is gone, there is a kind of silence called a ringing silence. Something like the negative shape of sound. People call it a ringing but this word isn't quite right. I think it's more like the sound you hear when you are drowning, when water encloses you and keeps air away from you and sound moves differently to reach your ears."

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Bertha_Mason
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry

"And then I thought about different silent letters I knew about and if it was possible to put them all together and spell a silent word."

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Bertha_Mason
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry

"The pictures were warped and greenish and of course there were the dried-out dead flies laying below them. Flies die in so many lonely places."

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Bertha_Mason
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry

"And his eyes were blue. That terrifying pale blue you see on dolls that have eyes that open and shut. His looked like they would shut forever once you knocked him over."

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Bertha_Mason
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry

"There was a fly in the car with the father and I. I wasn't sure if he was a slaughterhouse fly or just a middle-of-nowhere fly. One that got in when no one was noticing. And I wondered what it was going to be like for him when he got out again. What would he think when he flew out of the car and didn't recognize anything or anybody?"

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Bertha_Mason
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry

"Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe is a good place to go when you are left wondering what finally became of the person you stabbed and then left in the sun."

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GatheringBooks
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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#UncannyOctober Day 9: #FirstPersonNarrator often has raw, earthy, vulnerable voices. Love Lynda Barry‘s novels so am excited to read this one.

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Liberty
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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TFW your friend is so stunned you haven't read a certain book, they immediately mail you a copy. (TBH, I'm pretty stunned I haven't read it, either.) ☺️📚🤘🏻

quietjenn Oh! It's so, so great. 7y
quirkyreader This was a wonderful book. 7y
tapgurl I liked her other books too! Your friend is right on 7y
char1077 One of my favorites 7y
91 likes6 stack adds4 comments
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NerdyRev
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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In Woodstock today, so I popped over to the Golden Notebook. Here were my two picks. A book about authors' favorite bookstores and a book about a drug using journalist with great illustrations.

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chemicalpink
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
Pickpick

Loved this. Every minute of it, even though it was all fairly uncomfortable.

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chemicalpink
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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chemicalpink
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Very nearly done!!

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chemicalpink
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Follow the wires.

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chemicalpink
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Super digging this.

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chemicalpink
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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chemicalpink
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Damn

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chemicalpink
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Going to read this, an actual physical book, that one of my sweeties gave me before we were sweeties. I've been putting it off because ugh physical books, but I need to cut that out and read it already.

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Peddler410
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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I'm intrigued!

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tkmadden
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Writing desk here at the MacDowell Colony. ✨

quirkyreader I enjoyed Cruddy. It is a very good story. 8y
8leagueboot This looks busy and blissful ❤ 7y
52 likes2 comments
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Litsy
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Pickpick

It's #FunFridayPhoto time! This was chosen by @tkmadden "The book I recommend most often is Lynda Barry's CRUDDY. This novel is a dark, twisted, stunner narrated by 16-year-old Roberta Robheson, writing her autobiography. The majority of the story takes place on a father daughter road trip murder spree, but it's so much more than that. It's a tender examination of loyalty and blood. (Cont. below)

Litsy "Crookedly funny, observant, and devastating at once, this book is all hearts and daggers, a story that will make your fingertips tingle with every turn of the page. For better or worse, you will never forget it." 8y
106 likes24 stack adds3 comments
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Baxter.litsy
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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Pickpick

Cruddy is my favorite novel ever consumed. I have just finished it and find myself paralyzed; trapped still in its bloody, cruddy world. Does anyone have any further recommendations?

tkmadden it's my favorite book ever! if you like this, and want similar, I'd recommend 8y
Baxter.litsy @tkmadden I read and loved geek love. Will soon read diary of a teenage girl thanks for the recommendation!😁 Since posting my initial review, I found two books which I found comparable to Cruddy (albeit with less interesting, male narrators). Check out 8y
1 like4 comments
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tkmadden
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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"No matter what, expect the unexpected. And whenever possible BE the unexpected."

Favorite book in the whole world.

CherylDeFranceschi Love this book! 8y
NewWorldLibrary Love this book so much. 8y
tkmadden my #1 for always! 8y
30 likes4 stack adds3 comments
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Sweettartlaura
Cruddy: A Novel | Lynda Barry
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A weird novel, but I learned a lot from it

4 likes1 stack add