Books I've Loved: Mosquitoland

I read this over the weekend and loved it.

It's about a girl who is a little odd.  Her name is Mary Iris Malone, but everyone calls her Mim.  She runs away from her father and his new wife after overhearing a conversation that leads her to believe her mother is fighting an illness in the hometown her father has recently moved the family away from.

So Mim hops on a Greyhound bus and begins a journey across the States.

As you can probably imagine, things don't go as planned.  But what unfolds is a story about loyalty, misconceptions, misunderstandings and love.

Mim is a delightfully quirky narrator and I enjoyed my time in her company immensely.  I also enjoyed the ending which was full of surprises I never saw coming - well, most of them anyway.

I recommend this one very highly.  Once I picked it up, I really didn't want to put it down.

If you don't believe me, here's the blurb: 

"I am a collection of oddities, a circus of neurons and electrons: my heart is the ringmaster, my soul is the trapeze artist, and the world is my audience. It sounds strange because it is, and it is, because I am strange."

After the sudden collapse of her family, Mim Malone is dragged from her home in northern Ohio to the "wastelands" of Mississippi, where she lives in a medicated milieu with her dad and new stepmom. Before the dust has a chance to settle, she learns her mother is sick back in Cleveland.

So she ditches her new life and hops aboard a northbound Greyhound bus to her real home and her real mother, meeting a quirky cast of fellow travelers along the way. But when her thousand-mile journey takes a few turns she could never see coming, Mim must confront her own demons, redefining her notions of love, loyalty, and what it means to be sane.

Told in an unforgettable, kaleidoscopic voice, "Mosquitoland" is a modern American odyssey, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.