I thought it was a weirdly endearing portrait of a family that is so odd. It's so great.
Geek love (1989)
Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
I read the book Geek Love many years ago and enjoyed it at the time, but feel like if I read it now, I'd find a lot of the discussions about the body not right in terms of disability representation and I'm concerned about how that's going to be handled in this book as well.
i was gonna give this book four stars and then i kept thinking about it and kept thinking about it and i kind of have to give it five
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