Narration is a jumble of viewpoints including a boy who witnessed his mother's murder, a homeless girl who lost her house and half her family in a flood, a drug-dealing closeted lesbian teen, a morbidly obese lady who pretends to be a fat lady in a circus and a private detective who features in the fat lady's mental circus as the strong man. Got all that? The jumping around was dizzying and the main character - the girl from the flood – seems as flat as the others. I thought I was misunderstanding who the protagonist was. In the end, I think nobody was. Things happened around them and to them, but none of them seemed to really push the story along.
The book begins with a young boy witnessing his mother's murder by a man in a chicken mask.
Murder evidence is found and the killer is caught...until the same chicken-masked man (I hate typing that) reappears several years later in pursuit of the now-grown boy's own children. What follows is the meandering story of the man’s daughter, now four years older and surviving on the streets by sticking flaming cotton balls in her mouth for money and candy.
I really wish I was making that up.
Actually, I wish nobody had made it up. Homeless people get a bad enough rep.
Did I mention there's also a device that lets you speak to the dead using a radio? That particular bit gets tossed in and you'd think that this supernatural aspect would be threaded through the storyline. NOPE. Even the character who's supposed to be dead-set on retrieving the radio's blueprints doesn't really seem to care - it's like the villains who want to take over Gotham but don't notice they need to actually kill Batman instead of hoping he doesn’t foil their plans. Ugh.
The twists were sort of lazy squiggles and for the first time reading this author’s work, I figured out the surprises before the reveals. Characters reacted in totally unrealistic ways to incredibly stressful and dangerous situations. The ending seemed simplified to the point of juvenile and rushed. Burntown was a burn-out.
