July 24, 2019
Even Weirder Than Before, by Susie Taylor
There is a sweep to Susie Taylor’s debut novel, Even Weirder Than Before, each scene written in the present tense and turning into the other so seamlessly. Daisy Radcliffe—our protagonist, who we meet in her thirteenth year at precisely the moment that her father has left their family to take up with one of his graduate students—is never in transit, but rather Taylor has her narrative move from scene to scene and with such smoothness, like a film reel. Like the way that adolescence goes, I suppose, one life changing moment leading right into another without a great deal of forethought.
I really loved this book, which takes Daisy through her teen years, first kisses and first boyfriends, trying to find herself while her family has broken down, and the ebb and flow of friendship. Adolescence is a terrain that many authors have mined before, but Taylor’s approach is fresh and interesting, and all her characters are delivered complexity where lesser authors might have served up tropes (ie the depressed divorced middle aged woman; the deadbeat boyfriend). It doesn’t have quite the same level of absurdity, but Taylor’s narrative recalled Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole Diaries for me, and also Brian Francis’s debut novel Fruit, both books light on the surface but rich with subtext, which Even Weirder Than Before is exactly.
It’s a queer coming-of-age novel, but its politics is a trick up its sleeve, the very best move saved until the novel’s final sentence. But in the pages before it, we see Daisy learning about her own power as a woman and lack of it, how her mother is messed by the patriarchy, and how the characters in the book, male and female both, respond to the shootings at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique, a tragedy that doesn’t appear to touch Daisy’s world directly, and she’ll be older before she really understands. With a subtle hand, Taylor has written a political book that’s also at home in its bright and appealing pink cover—and it’s absolutely a joy to behold.
