Books like Clown Girl

i am re-writing this review & re-rating this book with a lower rating thanks to a barrage of comments from the book's author, as well as the author's obnoxious ass-kissing friends. these folks made me really stop & think about how i felt about this book, & i came to the conclusion that i liked it even less than i thought i did initially. i usually reserve my one-star ratings for true stinkers--books that made me froth with loathing. this book was just disappointing & dull. it wasn't really interesting enough to get worked up over, until the author began pestering me about her derivative kafka references & fantastical "imaginative" settings, & then i started to think about how much i loathed the main character of this book: a self-centered, passive, bratty, truly pathetic creature who is an aspiring clown. there was nothing like-able about this character, or any other character in the book. the protaganist has a miscarriage early in the book (off-stage) & spends the rest of the book limping around her setting feeling sorry for herself, wondering if she should try to stick things out with her absent clown boyfriend or give in to a burgeoning romance with a dull cop. this is pretty much the crux of the action: clown boyfriend? new cop boyfriend? clown babies? cop babies? & who took my rubber chicken, which is some sort of pathetic security blanket for the clown relationship? this was actually a rung below chick lit because not only was the female protaganist painfully insipid & seemingly powerless to make proactive decisions about the trajectory of her own life, as i have come to expect from the worst of chick lit, but she was patently unlikeable while she was wafting about being helpless obnoxious. i mean, at least the protag of the shopaholic books was kind of witty sometimes. this girl was a witless dullard, & i know it sucks when people don't like your books, but them's the breaks when you publish. attempting to brow-beat people into liking your stuff & sending emissaries to brag about awards you have won is unlikely to have much effect on people with a true understand of the quality expectations they bring to a book. writing a book is hard. writing a good book is even harder. this was not a good book.