Kiss Me, Stranger
An Illustrated Novel
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Publisher Description
Set in an unnamed country sometime in the past, present, or future, Kiss Me, Stranger is the story of one woman's attempts to keep her family together while a civil war rages around her.
Penelope, her husband and her fourteen children live in a small war-torn country built atop a landfill. After her husband and eldest son are drafted by opposing factions in the war, Penelope and her remaining children, desolate and nearly starving, are forced to scavenge for scrap--comprised of discarded consumer goods such as computers, televisions and automobiles--in the bombed-out city. When the government scrap collector makes an unreasonable demand in already unreasonable circumstances, Penelope slaps him across the face, leading to her arrest. Her subsequent escape sends her family on a journey literally into the heart of the landfill, where they come face to face with the stupidity, destruction and at times, dark humor, of war and modern consumer society.
Featuring over fifty illustrations by the author, Kiss Me, Stranger is a comical and tragic commentary on war, violence, and consumerism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tanner's scrappy debut plunges readers into a hyperactive, nonsensical alternate universe in which a family's life is made hell by a government gone nuts. Heroine Penelope has 14 children, and her husband and oldest son are away serving in the military, leaving her to contend with regular visits from a grumpy government scrap metal collector. After Penelope slaps the Metal Man for trying to take her oven racks to melt down into munitions, the family goes on the run, seeking refuge in a landfill, surviving as scavengers, and dodging cannibals. Penelope dreams of her husband and eldest son's adventures, and with revolution in the air, the questions become, will life get better under a new regime and will she see her loved ones again? At its best, the novel reads like a send up of The Road by a young Kurt Vonnegut, but these moments are few, with Tanner decreasingly interested in imparting significance to the frantic comic absurdities that pile up with alarming speed.
