Idaho Winter
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“The world of Tony Burgess is savage and blackly funny . . . It’s a place where you shouldn’t trust anybody, not even your narrator” (Uptown).
Idaho Winter is a boy who, through no fault of his own, is loathed by everyone in his town. His father feeds him roadkill for breakfast, the crossing guard steers cars toward him as he crosses the road, and parents encourage their children to plot against him. That is, until he meets a young girl named Madison who empathizes with his suffering. But when Madison is attacked by dogs meant to harm Idaho, Idaho gets up and runs home, changing the course of the entire story . . .
Idaho soon learns that his suffering has been cruelly designed by a clumsy writer who has made his book meaner than all the others to make it stand out. With this information, Idaho has become armed with the knowledge that the entire world is invented, and that he now has the power to change things—in a novel that is both “one of the finest parodies ever penned of the stereotypically didactic young adult novel” (Macleans) and “the most brilliantly terrifying dream you’ve ever had” (The Globe and Mail, Toronto).
“[Burgess] proves himself to be a witty, lightning-quick conjurer of misanthropy in this brief, kaleidoscopic novel,” a nominee for the Trillium Award (Publishers Weekly).
“An incredibly rich and thought provoking read about the theory of storytelling.” —subTerrain
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Burgess's wild latest concerns a ninth-grade boy named Idaho Winter who is abused by everyone for no apparent reason even his school's crossing guard tries to get him killed. Only two people don't have it in for the poor boy: one is a classmate, Madison, the other is "you, the reader," but just when Madison attempts to befriend Idaho, they are separated, and the narrator, a free-floating omniscient observer, becomes a character in the story and is dismayed to find Idaho now in control and none too happy with the lot the narrator has given him. In self-preservation mode, the narrator leads a group of his own characters on a quest to reunite Idaho and Madison. Burgess (Pontypool Changes Everything) is nothing if not imaginative, and though he tends to tip too far into the ridiculous particularly once Idaho starts his campaign of revenge on his former tormentors (a school guidance counselor, for instance, has been reduced to a talking head that protrudes from the back of the crossing guard; elsewhere lurk ferocious Mom-bats that have heads resembling Idaho's mother) he proves himself to be a witty, lightning-quick conjurer of misanthropy in this brief, kaleidoscopic novel.
