Lynda Barry also does
Ernie Pook's Comeek, but it's a whole different beast than this
book, which will
hurt you on every page, and won't let up. But I wanted it to; I wanted to know
what was going to happen and how she was going to
tell me about it. This book made me very
tired, but
good tired.
"When we first moved here, the mother took the blue-mirror cross that hung over her bed in the old house and nailed a nail for it in the new bedroom of me and my sister. Truthfully it is a cross I have never liked. The Jesus of it seems haunted. He's the light-absorber kind. In the pitch-black middle of the night he will start to glow green at you with his arms up like he is doing a tragic ballet. Some nights looking at him scares me so bad I can hardly move and I start doing a prayer for protection. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?"
There are funny parts in it too, but that's not what stayed with me - I kept hold of the sad honest picture of a tossed-about life.