In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the
ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently
abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in
England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going
to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as
"Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be
famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a
psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as
the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support
and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent
on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with
the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from
the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget,
inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging
nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative
personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In
the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found
Mom and a semblance of family, or are, they completely out of control
and ready to explode?
