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About
Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a seedy neighborhood where drugs, balloon animals, and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, she struggles to live her dreams, calling on cultural masters Charlie Chaplin, Kafka, and da Vinci for inspiration. In an effort to support herself and her layabout performance-artist boyfriend, Clown Girl finds herself unwittingly transformed into a "corporate clown," trapping herself in a cycle of meaningless, high-paid gigs that veer dangerously close to prostitution. Monica Drake has created a novel that riffs on the high comedy of early film stars-most notably Chaplin and W. C. Fields-to raise questions of class, gender, economics, and prejudice. Resisting easy classification, this debut novel blends the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty with stunning skill. "Clown Girl by Monica Drake. She's an amazing writer and, she's created this incredible world." -Kristen Wiig, The Daily Beast
"Clown Girl is sideways humor: social commentary disguised as pratfalls. It's surely one of the most polished and eccentric pieces of fiction to come along in recent memory, the result of several years' work by this talented Portland writer. Drake's humor won't compute for every reader. Just the smart ones who dig gray and hot-pink neon." -The Seattle Times
"Riffing on language and revising her jokes in nervous flurries, Nita is the most endearingly teary clown since Smokey Robinson." -Entertainment Weekly
"Clown Girl is a devishly quirky look at a downtrodden young clown adrift in the hostile streets of Baloneytown. It is a worthy fictional successor to another Rose City female writer's highly original novel with not-dissimilar material-Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, an instant idiosyncratic classic about freaks in a traveling carnival that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989." - The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Sniffles, the titular clown girl, is endearingly self-deprecating, an oddball comic who masks her insecurity with a show of bravado and, more literally, a crazy array of clown garb. Clown Girl is a polished, quirky and often-funny look at the dark side of clown life." -Winnipeg Free Press
"Can a farce involving strap-on 'pendulous breasts,' a rubber chicken called Plucky, biblical balloon tricks, a marijuana-eating puppy, clown fetishists and the phrase 'EKG=Nazis' also succeed as a work of psychological realism? Monica Drake's debut novel Clown Girl leads me to believe the answer is yes. Clown Girl's pages give off the perfume of sun-baked concrete, cinnamon, turpentine, spilled beer, bruised fruit, piss and clown grease. It's a sharp and engaging debut-which I suppose is a fancy way of saying I want to read it again." -Philadelphia Weekly
"Drake's humor will strike some as dark, but it would be more accurately described as shades of gray shot through with hot pink. Her Nita is hilarious and poignant, fantastical and real." -The Oregonian
"Drake is raising expectations with Clown Girl, a tight, claustrophobic little tale with a charming cast of self-obsessed screwups." -Willamette Week
"Drake's imagination is boundless, her compassion intense. No matter how absurd a situation this antiheroine gets herself into, it's impossible not to will her to get back out. The strange world that Drake creates in Clown Girl is peculiarity entrancing and wholly, vividly imagined: You can substitute any put-upon, impoverished, outside-the-mainstream or even simply imperfect sort of individual or group for her clowns, or you can read Clown Girl as a gorgeous mix of character study and unlikely manifesto about the artist's place in the world." -Eugene Weekly
"Welcome to wacky, stressful Baloneytown, where clown prostitution, stoned dogs and fire juggling-cum-arson are the norm. [T]he pace of the narrative is methamphetamine-frantic, as Drake drills down past the face paint and into Nita's
"Clown Girl is sideways humor: social commentary disguised as pratfalls. It's surely one of the most polished and eccentric pieces of fiction to come along in recent memory, the result of several years' work by this talented Portland writer. Drake's humor won't compute for every reader. Just the smart ones who dig gray and hot-pink neon." -The Seattle Times
"Riffing on language and revising her jokes in nervous flurries, Nita is the most endearingly teary clown since Smokey Robinson." -Entertainment Weekly
"Clown Girl is a devishly quirky look at a downtrodden young clown adrift in the hostile streets of Baloneytown. It is a worthy fictional successor to another Rose City female writer's highly original novel with not-dissimilar material-Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, an instant idiosyncratic classic about freaks in a traveling carnival that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989." - The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Sniffles, the titular clown girl, is endearingly self-deprecating, an oddball comic who masks her insecurity with a show of bravado and, more literally, a crazy array of clown garb. Clown Girl is a polished, quirky and often-funny look at the dark side of clown life." -Winnipeg Free Press
"Can a farce involving strap-on 'pendulous breasts,' a rubber chicken called Plucky, biblical balloon tricks, a marijuana-eating puppy, clown fetishists and the phrase 'EKG=Nazis' also succeed as a work of psychological realism? Monica Drake's debut novel Clown Girl leads me to believe the answer is yes. Clown Girl's pages give off the perfume of sun-baked concrete, cinnamon, turpentine, spilled beer, bruised fruit, piss and clown grease. It's a sharp and engaging debut-which I suppose is a fancy way of saying I want to read it again." -Philadelphia Weekly
"Drake's humor will strike some as dark, but it would be more accurately described as shades of gray shot through with hot pink. Her Nita is hilarious and poignant, fantastical and real." -The Oregonian
"Drake is raising expectations with Clown Girl, a tight, claustrophobic little tale with a charming cast of self-obsessed screwups." -Willamette Week
"Drake's imagination is boundless, her compassion intense. No matter how absurd a situation this antiheroine gets herself into, it's impossible not to will her to get back out. The strange world that Drake creates in Clown Girl is peculiarity entrancing and wholly, vividly imagined: You can substitute any put-upon, impoverished, outside-the-mainstream or even simply imperfect sort of individual or group for her clowns, or you can read Clown Girl as a gorgeous mix of character study and unlikely manifesto about the artist's place in the world." -Eugene Weekly
"Welcome to wacky, stressful Baloneytown, where clown prostitution, stoned dogs and fire juggling-cum-arson are the norm. [T]he pace of the narrative is methamphetamine-frantic, as Drake drills down past the face paint and into Nita's