The First Bad Man: A Novel
The New York Times Bestseller The "brilliant, hilarious, irreverent, piercing" (O, The Oprah Magazine) debut novel from Miranda July, acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and author of All Fours, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. Cheryl Glickman believes in romances that span centuries and a soul that migrates between babies. She works at a women's self-defense nonprofit and lives alone. When her bosses ask if their twenty-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a while, Cheryl's eccentrically ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee--the selfish, cruel blond bombshell--who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, leads her to the love of a lifetime. Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic, and important voice today, and a writer for all time.
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Community Reviews
I was loving this book in the beginning. It started out as darkly funny and relatable, with Cheryl's extreme social awkwardness and the silly results therefrom. Then it quickly turned outlandish and depressing. I stuck it out and it got a little less depressing but still outlandish, and then slightly less outlandish but depressing. The end.
As a BIG fan of Miranda July, this novel was surprising, not so much in it's prose (which was very like July in its quirky but cutting flow) but in the story that it told. Much like in No One Belongs Here More Than You, July likes to fixate on the less observed sides of less than desirable characters in unfortunate situations. Her stories tend to ask you to empathize in ways that you maybe haven't before with characters that you wouldn't normally relate to. I think this book asked a little too much of the reader. While I appreciated it's place in the Miranda July anthology, it was not my favorite.
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