The Family Fang
Kevin Wilson
2011
336 pages
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I admit it. I bought it for the cute cover. Plus, fangs. It’s hard to resist fangs in October.
Annie and Buster (aka Child A and Child B) grew up with a couple of whacked parents. Mr. and Mrs. Fang were into performance art, and Child A and Child B were an integral part of the performances…whether they wanted to be or not.
And now that they’re grown up, Annie and Buster’s lives seem like something out of a skit that their parents dreamt up. Annie’s acting career is on the skids because of a topless incident gone awry, and Buster’s face is all smashed up thanks to a run-in with a potato launcher. They both end up back home only to be confronted with yet another one of their parent’s mad schemes. Except maybe it’s not a mad scheme? Maybe it’s for real? Kinda hard to tell with the Fangs, but Annie and Buster are giving it all they’ve got.
The present mystery of the Fangs is interspersed with the performance art of Annie and Buster’s childhood. Both the present and the past is pretty odd, and I’m not sure how I felt about the book in the end. While the story was entertaining, everything was just a bit too much (and I like weird…I just don’t like people making uncomfortably weird decisions with their lives…like offering yourself up as a target for a potato launcher).
If things are odd just for the sake of being odd, it bugs me. This may not be for me.
Fiction or non?
I checked this one out from the library, but it went back unread because I couldn’t find time. I am ok with weird, but like you said, too weird, and I just lose interest. I might try this one on audio, if I can.
I like clever weird, but if it’s weird weird I can be turned off. I recently read Shine Shine Shine and I’m currently trying to figure out which category it fits in. When I read the reviews of this one when it came out, I thought it sounded like a bad bet.
This was definitely one of the weirder books I’ve read, I think that’s why I liked it so much
Oh that is a great cover!
This looks great, and it’s funny…there’s a guy named Kevin Wilson who works nearby. I just saw him outside and talked to him a little.
I really, really liked this book! Weird in a fun way.
The worst, worst, worst thing for me was that scene where the parents take them out to dinner, and Annie and Buster have no idea what’s going to happen, and in the end Buster gets so nervous and upset he throws up. That was the moment at which I was sure I wouldn’t love the book no matter what happened thereafter.
I have yet to hear something GREAT about this book so it hasn’t compelled me to pick this one out of my big piles of books.
I am confused. Is this book not about vampires? How funny that EVERY BOOK now is about vampires except (possibly) one that is about an eccentric family with the last name “Fang.”
I think I’ll give it a miss. I sometimes like weird, but not CRUEL weird.
Odd can be good, too odd is usually not good.