The narrator of this book is a young teenage girl with verbal diarrhoea, who goes on and on and on for 200 pages. Most of the time it is all very entertaining. She is both innocent and precocious. She lives in Paris where she spends her time in the company of Uncle Berky. He, she describes as a ʻhomey setchualʼ but may be a ʻbikeʼ. When her mother announces that she is pregnant and about to remarry, she writes:
“I don’t dig my mom any more, for a felinist she’s too much of a pussy with him. That’s not how she treated her previous bozos.”
There is a lot of word-play going on in this novel with the girl mis-quoting words and the reader never quite sure if she really knows or not. In the end it all boils down to a plea for people to at once recognize and tolerate differences of race, sexuality and belief. Along the way there is a lot of fun, tension and misapprehension. The reader will become ʻflabbyghostedʼ by the resiliance and tenacity of Uncle Berky’s niece as she talks her way through France, Italy and indeed the whole world. If your ears can stand it, you’ll love this book!