If you're like me, you are always on the lookout for a novel that speaks to the homicidal teenage girl on acid inside of you. Well, today you are in luck, unless you've already read this 1999 masterpiece by artist/writer/teacher/goddess Lynda Barry.
Best known for her comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, which ran in many weekly alternative papers in the 1980s and '90s, Barry creates characters that are simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. In Cruddy, 16-year-old narrator Roberta Rohbeson lives in poverty, "on a cruddy street, on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe." As the story begins, Roberta has been grounded for a year due to getting caught "tripping on drugs very badly." In one long journal entry/suicide note, Roberta composes the "famous book" she plans to leave behind: the recounting of a road trip with her violent, alcoholic father, which leaves a trail of death and destruction and concludes with Roberta stranded on a desert highway, her trusty knife Little Debbie as her only companion.
Although Barry departed from her usual cartoon format, the ominous black and white drawings she includes throughout beautifully enhance this dark tale. Nice touches are the illustrated endsheets, which are maps detailing both Roberta's cruddy hometown and the route of her and her father's horrifying crime spree, er, family vacation.
Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel by Lynda Barry
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