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  1 KooKooLand
Author: Norris, Gloria Biographee: Norris, Gloria
 
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Class: 306.87
Age: Adult
Language: English
LC: HQ537
ISBN-13: 9781941393604
LCCN: 2015930624
Imprint: Regan Arts
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pub Date: 01/05/2016
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $27.00
  Hardcover
Physical Description: 355 pages ; 24 cm H 9", W 6", D 1.3", 1.16 lbs.
LC Series:
Brodart Sources:
Bibliographies: Public Library Core Collection: Nonfiction, 16th ed.
Public Library Core Collection: Nonfiction, 17th ed.
Awards:
Starred Reviews:
TIPS Subjects: Family Life
Psychology/Self-Help
Biography, Individual
BISAC Subjects: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
TRUE CRIME / General
LC Subjects: Fathers and daughters
SEARS Subjects: Crime
Reading Programs:
 
Annotations
ONIX annotations | 03/23/2020
Gloria Norris's KooKooLand is amemoir written on the edge of aknife blade. Chilling, intensely moving,and darkly funny, it cuts to the heartand soul of a troubled American family,and announces the arrival of a startlinglyoriginal voice. Gloria Norris grew up in the projects ofManchester, New Hampshire with her parents,her sister, Virginia, and her cat, Sylvester. Asnapshot might show a happy, young family,but only a dummkopf would buy that. Nine-year-old Gloria is gutsy and wisecracking.Her father, Jimmy, all dazzle anddanger, is often on the far side of the law andmakes his own rules-which everyone elsebetter follow. Gloria's mom, Shirley, triesnot to rock the boat, Virginia unwisely defiesJimmy, and Gloria fashions herself into hissidekick-the son he never had. Jimmy takes Gloria everywhere. Hunting,to the racetrack, to slasher movies, andto his parents' dingy bar-a hole in the wallwith pickled eggs and pickled alkies. But itis at Hank Piasecny's gun shop that Gloriameets the person who will change her life.While Hank and Jimmy trade good-humoredinsults, Gloria comes under the spell ofHank's college-age daughter,Susan. Brilliant, pretty,kind, and ambitious,Susan is everythingGloria longs to be-and can be, provided she dreams big andaces third grade like Susan tells her to. But, one night, a brutal act changes thecourse of all their lives. The story that unfoldsis a profound portrait of how violence echoesthrough a family, and through a community.From the tragedy, Gloria finds a way to carveout a future on her own terms and ends upjust where she wants to be. Gripping andunforgettable, KooKooLand is a triumph.
Journal Reviews
Booklist | 11/15/2015
Although many vibrant characters populate this chilling memoir, Norris' re-creation of her early 1960s nine-year-old self is a spot-on treat and a terror. Although she is determined not to be cowed or undermined by her often cruel, scheming, and drunken dad, Jimmy (like older half sister Virginia and nice mother Shirley), her telling ratchets up a spooky, excruciating tension. The racist, misogynistic Jimmy is a loaded gun, ready to fire at nearly anything for any reason. Yet it's his best friend, Hank, who blows, murdering his ex-wife and another man. Thus does young Norris' brightest spot and mentor--her older friend Susan, Hank's daughter--land in a mental hospital, over and over, while Hank goes free. Norris compellingly leads readers through her young life, alternately loving, fearing, and hating her father (the latter two with especially good reason), and it's a bravely faced and remembered coming-of-age that segues into Norris' amazing comeback as a filmmaker and writer who never forgets her mentor, Susan. A tumble through a tumultuous time, in which the heroine inexplicably, beautifully lands on her feet. Kinney, Eloise. 368p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2015.
Kirkus Reviews | 10/15/2015
An independent film producer's story of how she grew up dominated by her charismatic, troubled father but managed to break free of his influence. Norris' hard-living Greek-American father, Jimmy, was larger than life. A fisherman, hunter, and racetrack gambler fascinated by violence, he often took the family to see slasher movies at the local drive-in. There, he playfully scared his daughter by transforming his hand into what she called "the Hairy Claw." But Norris knew better. "I had seen that hand rip out the still-warm guts of dead animals ten times my size," writes the author. Jimmy often humiliated Norris, her mother, and sister with his misogynistic comments and behavior, but the author loved her father and identified with him to the point where her colorful, slangy English was virtually indistinguishable from what Jimmy used. At the same time, she also found herself longing to be like her friend Susan, a beautiful and talented rich girl who was "really going places" and whom even Jimmy could not fault. Then Susan's father murdered her mother, and her mother's lover and Susan descended into personal chaos. At the same time, the Norris household began to unravel as Jimmy became more erratic and eventually threatened to kill his own long-suffering wife. The author escaped by becoming the only member of her working-class family to go to college, where she immersed herself in the filmmaking that became her life's work. Away from her home and the father who terrorized it, Norris finally began the slow process of learning how to remove the words that her father put into her mouth "like a ventriloquist." By turns heartbreaking and darkly humorous, the book not only offers a compelling yet comic portrayal of a fraught father-daughter relationship. Norris also reveals the way violence can become a self-replicating cancer within families. An intelligent and bracing memoir. 356pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2015.
Publishers Weekly | 11/16/2015
In this grim memoir, screenwriter Norris (The Moment) writes of growing up in the housing projects of Manchester, N.H., in the 1960s, and escaping to California to find success as a filmmaker. Norris's father, Jimmy, overwhelms her with awe and fear when she's a little girl, and disgust when she's an adult. But Jimmy is the story's star, and its arc is his evolution from a drunken, abusive criminal to a more egregiously drunken, abusive criminal. It's an awful tale, told dispassionately, of a man who claws his way through life dealing stolen TVs, drinking and drugging, berating those who cross him, and taking his daughter to shoot rats at the dump. Things get worse at particular points--when a family friend butchers his estranged wife with a kitchen knife, when the daughter of that family murders her dad, and finally, when Jimmy almost kills the author's mother. He's never redeemed. The only way forward for the women in Jimmy's world is to flee. They head to Kookooland, Jimmy's name for California: the author moves there to retreat from her dad and write this story from a distance, both literal and metaphorical; Norris's mother visits in the last years of her life, after Jimmy dies; and the murdering daughter of the family friend has her ashes scattered in California. Unfortunately, because Norris takes herself out of the action, the memoir feels like little more than a rap sheet of her father's misbehavior. (Jan.). 304p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2015.
9781941393604,dl.it[0].title