Bridget McNulty

My second US book review!

// April 1st, 2009 // Reviews, Strange Nervous Laughter

Don’t worry, I won’t be blogging about every single review I get in the States! But it is pretty freaking exciting that 6 weeks before the book hits shelves, I have two great reviews! Especially seeing as it’s a very Durban book, and there was a chance that overseas readers wouldn’t ‘get it’ like South Africans (who know the city inside out) did…
This is from the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine (ladida!):

Strange Nervous Laughter by Bridget McNulty.

McNulty’s unapologetically whimsical tale follows the intersecting lives of six eccentric characters as peculiar obsessions, unexpected romances, and isolated lives collide following a random burglary in a local grocery store.  One of the more engaging story lines follows the lovelorn Beth, a timid cashier at Handy Green Grocers, who literally floats when she is happy, especially after she becomes surreptitiously enamored of Pravesh, a brooding undertaker with a fetish for toenails and teenage pop stars.  Meryl, a tightly wound Guinness Book representative, ferociously guards every emotion until she meets Harry, an idiosyncratic garbageman who steals tips at the local diner and surrounds himself with the discarded items he finds at the dump.  The lonely Mdu is content to communicate only with whales until, after the burglary, he meets and falls in love with Aisha, a dreamy orphan whose tears turn into prismatic beads when she sleeps.  Set against a sweltering South African summer, McNulty’s heady debut twines her characters’ unusual circumstances as they construct and destruct the joy and displeasure of love’s erratic consequences.