Cruddy

ok, primarily an adjective meaning not so great, bad, crummy, from English, crud..

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(but also) A book by Lynda Barry about Roberta Rohbeson, a cruddy girl who lives (and tells) her cruddy life in a cruddy town. It just goes to show that Lynda Barry is funny and should be president, and the world is evil. Featuring highly are her homicidal meat-man father; Little Debbie the Navy knife; the Turtle, an escaped juvenile mental patient and drug dealer; and of course, Roberta, who has seen and done far too many things for her age.

Lynda Barry also does Ernie Pook's Comeek, but it's a whole different beast than this book, which will hurt you on every page, and won't let up. But I wanted it to; I wanted to know what was going to happen and how she was going to tell me about it. This book made me very tired, but good tired.

"When we first moved here, the mother took the blue-mirror cross that hung over her bed in the old house and nailed a nail for it in the new bedroom of me and my sister. Truthfully it is a cross I have never liked. The Jesus of it seems haunted. He's the light-absorber kind. In the pitch-black middle of the night he will start to glow green at you with his arms up like he is doing a tragic ballet. Some nights looking at him scares me so bad I can hardly move and I start doing a prayer for protection. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?"

There are funny parts in it too, but that's not what stayed with me - I kept hold of the sad honest picture of a tossed-about life.