Jennifer's Reviews > Geek Love

Geek Love follows the Binewski family magical-realism style. It starts with Al, the soon-to-be father who gets the notion in his head of breeding his own freak show.

People talk easily to me. They think a bald albino hunchback dwarf can’t hide anything.

The absurdity of this unhinged narrative only ratchets up from there, and it's beautiful and ugly.

We follow Olympia/Oly, who is a...bald albino hunchback dwarf. She has several siblings who are more impressive than her from a freak standpoint, but I'll just tell you about one of the dead ones for now:

Leona’s jar was labeled “The Lizard Girl” and she looked the part. Her head was long from front to back and the forehead was compressed and flattened over small features that collapsed into her long throat with no chin to disturb the line. She had a big fleshy tail, as thick as a leg where it sprouted from her spine, but then tapering to a point. There was a faint greenish sheen to her skin but I suspected that Arty was right in claiming that Al had painted it on after Leona died. “She was only seven months old,” Lil would murmur. “We never understood why she died.”

Horror is one of the top tags for this. I'm not sure that I really agree. It's macabre and bursting with dark humor, but I think it would be a mistake to come into it expecting a horror novel. I can definitely see that the Freak Show season of American Horror Story could have been partly inspired by this, however (although that show is barely horror itself tbf).

Most of the "horror" probably comes from Arturo/Arty's storyline.

‘The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack’s patients.’ Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.

Arty...imagine if Artemis Fowl had no hands or legs and pretended not to be super bitter about it, and that's about how Arty, the Aqua Boy, is. Confined to a powerless body, he quickly learns to use his mind as his means of controlling his environment and those around him. He is one of the most important siblings and is the one Oly is closest to.

“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”

While I no doubt have a lot of pondering to do before I can fully understand and appreciate this book, one of Dunn's major themes is that deformity can cover the full range of people/personality. They don't have to be nice, and they don't have to pine away the wee hours in dreams of being a "norm." In fact, it's more often the opposite sentiment that drives this story to its wildest peaks.

My only caveat would be that the chapters that happen in the present (most of the book takes place in the past) can be a little off putting when they first appear. I recommend pushing past that to get to the core of the book. Despite that, this is my favorite book of the year.