July Brazos Best: COMEMADRE
We have been waiting for MONTHS to share this book! Comemadre has been a store favorite since March, when we got a single Advance Copy into the store and circulated it around the staff like a black market substance. Since the love for this book is so strong, we couldn't decide whose review to include. So take a look below at all our descriptions, then swing by the store to pick up a copy of this weird little gem from Coffee House Press.
Comemadre is our best of the month for a reason: this little book accomplishes so much in 150 pages. The book ricochets from a failed, morally-dubious experiment in a 1907 insane asylum to the performance art scene early 2000s. If you're looking for a wild ride, this might be your dream novel. Mixing lowbrow and highbrow, science and art, Comemadre has everything from frog figurines to talking heads to identical artists, all of which culminate in investigating the questions: do we have a soul? When does the body die? What is transcendence?
- Sara
Like a beloved b-movie, this is the campy horror show all my fellow sickos have been waiting for. A darkly comic and slyly philosophical novel about the human drive to understand death through both science and art. Funny, grotesque and smart.
- Keaton
By turns strange & comic, beautiful & violent, a story with a foot in two different centuries, Comemadre is the debut of an original voice. Told in two parts, this slim novel deals with humankind’s grim thirst for the afterlife. A novel that entertains with its gallows humor and shocking obsession with art and mortality. One of the best books I’ve read this year.
- Mark
