The Greatest Of Marlys
by Lynda Barry
Buy on AmazonLynda Barry, who with unflinching honesty chronicled the interior lives of the three Mullen children — Maybonne, Marlys and Freddie — in her syndicated comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, is a gift to the world. In this best-of collection, middle child Marlys braves a host of petty pubertal travails and fleeting moments of pure, ecstatic joy. Barry’s genius lies in getting us to see — and feel — the world around her characters acutely as they do: Her sense-memory of childhood is vivid, and she expresses it with a deeply evocative, low-fi poetry.
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"Lynda Barry, who with unflinching honesty chronicled the interior lives of the three Mullen children — Maybonne, Marlys and Freddie — in her syndicated comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, is a gift to the world. In this best-of collection, middle child Marlys braves a host of petty pubertal travails and fleeting moments of pure, ecstatic joy. Barry’s genius lies in getting us to see — and feel — the world around her characters acutely as they do: Her sense-memory of childhood is vivid, and she expresses it with a deeply evocative, low-fi poetry."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org