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Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, and the salvation of soul music at a radio station straight out of a Quentin Tarantino version of The Twilight Zone. These are just a few of the luminous characters and conjurings Kris Saknussemm delivers in his kaleidoscopic Sea Monkeysthe story of his growing up in the counterculture San Francisco Bay Area and central California in the 1960s.Known for his genre-bending works Zanesville and Private Midnight, Saknussemm now gives us a highly original take on the nonfiction memoir, in which he shatters the stained glass windows of his father's church and mixes the pieces with ghost cartoons, the Cronkite contradictions of Civil Rights demonstrations, and ads for laxatives during a strange hiatus in American sanity when Sly Stone and Perry Como could both be in the Top 10. Honest, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Sea Monkeys is the no-holds-barred tale of one of our most exciting contemporary authors’ own coming of age, and the perfect follow-up to Saknussemm’s Zanesville, which Booklist hailed as one of the most creative, edgy, and entertaining novels spawned in a decade.”
Having grown up in the late 60's and 70's this collection of short reminiscences speaks volumes to me. It is an insightful look into, not only the recent past, but also the underbelly of Kris Saknussemm, author of some of my favorite books, i.e. Private Midnight, Reverend America and the now, Sea Monkeys. What could be just another travelogue of the Bay Area turns into, at times, a disturbing look at a young boy doing his best to decipher the adults around him. Not only is he having to deal with an alcoholic father, but also a first grade teacher who is dressing him up and calling him by her dead son's name (School for the Dead). You will not only be transported back to a time when life seemed simpler, but also a time when life was odd, very odd - at least for this prosaic writer named Kris Saknussemm.
