“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 core, often using Nita’s relations with men as the bit. Nita emerges as a fully-realized character, bearing witness to a lot of the emotionally ridiculous and just a hint of the sublime. [T]here is a lot more going on here than just clowning around.” —Publishers Weekly
“Writers are nothing if not rivals, but competition as good as Monica Drake is a blessing. Clown Girl is more than a great book. Clown Girl is its own reality. We should all have an arch enemy this brilliant.” —Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
“Monica Drake’s Clown Girl is a high-voltage creation. She’s a passionate martyr to the art of clowning in a slapstick world that despises and exploits clowns. She’s hit a rough patch where the pratfalls hurt and the locals don’t get her jokes. She’s Groucho one hour, Chaplin the next, and a hospitalized Stooge or three by sunrise. She’s sad as Emmett Kelly, indignant as Holden Caulfield. Maybe she’s wrong. She’s certainly cranky. But Clown Girl is mesmerizing, drunk on the high wire, gorgeous and dangerous fun.” —Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love
“Clown Girl is an extreme novel—beyond metaphor, a hilarious book that asks the startling question: what does it mean to be serious about clowning? This intelligent narrative always keeps in mind the bleakness and desperation that initially caused a need for clowns, and that they, in their way, embody. Is there exaggeration in the book’s narrator, or in its world, or neither, or both? I found myself asking if I were myself a clown⎯and if not, why not? Caulrophiles and caulrophobes, prepare yourselves!” —Peter Rock, author of The Unsettling
“Monica Drake’s Clown Girl is a bright shining bubble of a novel, dark, funny and deeply strange. The writing is brilliant—I would read this novel for the sentences alone—but it is Sniffles herself and her struggles to come to grips with life in Baloneytown that stay with me. The word ‘unique’ is widely abused but I think, for once, it’s justified: this novel is not much like anything else, and all the better for it. A really exciting debut.” —Kevin Canty, author of Winslow in Love
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