Book Review: Made for Love by Alissa Nutting
Published July 2017
Ecco
One-sentence summary:
Hazel leaves her controlling, powerful husband, only to run into more chaos.
Alissa Nutting has a very interesting brain.
Made for Love includes a wacky cast of characters:
- A tech scion with enough money and power to justify his privacy-invading and often illegal eccentricities.
- An emotionally distant father who wants only a sex doll as his primary companion
- A weathered grave sitter named Liver who, strangely, is the lothario of the book
- A conman who can’t get over his sexual attraction to dolphins
And then we have our main, character, Hazel. Hazel, with her many quirks and hangups and phobias, who passively goes through life and passively marries Byron so she can get out of the financial mess she’s made.
She knows she’s made a mistake. Eventually, she stops being passive and leaves. But how can Byron let go of his up-to-now passive subject of his latest tech experiments? Her body holds too many important gadgets. Her brain, too much insider knowledge.
What follows is a chaotic journey as we see Hazel in her quest to be free of Byron and Jasper in his quest to be free of wanting dolphin nookie.
Seriously, no one is normal in this universe.
And I like it.
This is a world where getting sh*tfaced drunk, crawling across the neighbor’s lawn, and barking at their plastic flamingoes is a conceivable Tuesday night.
It quite reminds me of Christopher Moore novels. Or Tom Robbins. Characters are on just the right side of clinical insanity (or not) and everyone else accepts it at face value.
Falling into this universe is strange and off-kilter. There’s no telling what will happen next, and no compass of normalcy to refer to. And it’s delightful.
I mean, wouldn’t we all like to let loose and drunkenly bark at lawn flamingos at some point in our lives?
