Reviews for Emotionally weird

The average rating for Emotionally weird based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-22 00:00:00 Ahmad Ali Can you see the cover of Emotionally Weird that I read? I don't know, but if it's a peach colored cover with a sort of crappy drawing of a redheaded woman smoking and a dog then you are seeing it? Or maybe you are seeing the new cover, which is dark and fits with the covers of Kate Atkinson's later novels? Or maybe you see the British covers with the big and dopey but cute looking dog on the cover? I read the peach colored one, with the girly script. The one that screams early to mid-ought chick-lit. The one that would make you think this is about a young woman who frets and worries that her almost perfect life is not a hundred percent perfect because she hasn't yet married the most amazing man in the world, but until then she will shop for shoes and complain about her glamourous job. That the author is Scottish and not English might be a hint that this isn't the case, but shouldn't England's neighbors to the North be able to produce self-absorbed novels for young and privileged young ladies? Normally, I believe that the maxim you can't judge a book by it's cover is bullshit. You can judge almost every book by it's cover, the cover is usually an excellent signpost to what you are getting into. Yeah, every now and then you'll have a book with some amazing Chip Kidd cover that turns out to be garbage, but it's rare that you are totally mistaken about what kind of book you are getting yourself into. Here though, the cover is totally misleading. I don't think there is a single shoe bought in the book, the narrator does pine for an unknown mystery man who she thinks it would be fabulous to get to make out with, but those moments of wistful yearning are just a few pages of the 350 that make up the novel. The rest of the novel is something that is much more Broom of the System era David Foster Wallace than anything by Sophie Kinsella or her ilk. You wouldn't expect a book with this cover to make jokes about Barthes and Adorno. At first when I started reading this book I took pains to hide the cover when reading it on the subway. I felt my already low masculinity was in danger of completely evaporating. But after a day or so of reading it, I stopped worrying about silly things like that, because even if I might be judged silently by strangers I knew that I was reading a very un-chick book, and a book that is quite good. So damn you judging strangers! The novel. The novel and the nature of telling stories is sort of what is going on in this book. The basic gist, without giving away too much is a young woman is telling a story, which may be true or may be a novel she's working on, to a woman who may be her mother or may not be. The story is about a few weeks in the winter of 1972 at a college in Dundee, Scotland. The narrator is an English major (is that what they call them over there across the pond?) who is writing a detective novel for a creative writing class, so the story breaks every now and then to have some of the awful student novel given in the text. Along with the interjection of this novel within the story, the 'real world' intrudes on the text too, with dialogue between the narrator and the woman who may or may not be her mother, and to give one last tweak to the stories within stories structure the woman who may or may not be the narrator's mother has her own story to tell. This sounds like a mess, but the way Atkinson handles these stories within stories is not nearly as difficult as I'm making it sound, it's more confusing to think about then to actually read. The use of different fonts for different narrative levels keeps the reader from getting lost. Like DFW's first novel, this is at heart a comic novel. It's more of a 'college' novel than DFW's, but you could almost imagine that the Amherst that shows up in Broom of the System exists in the same universe as Atkinson's Dundee. It's a lampoon of theory and the personalities that inhabit academia. It's filled with jokes mocking (post)structural theorists, student activists, and the swelled up egos of self-centered professors. Good stuff, but unfortunately even with the new 'darker' cover I don't think this book is ever going to call out to the type of reader who would enjoy it most.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-03 00:00:00 Sean Martin [ or possibly not her mother (hide spoiler)]