I am deathly afraid of clowns, and it has nothing to do with the movie It.

This fear first manifested itself at my fourth birthday party. My mother thought it would be loads of fun to get the neighborhood kids together for me and get a clown to entertain us. I remember distinctly begging her not to let the clown paint her face. I’m not sure why I was so against it–it probably has something to do with letting a stranger whose face I couldn’t make out get near me–but I remember begging her profusely. I also made my grandmother and my great-grandmother promise the same thing. I just knew that no one was coming near my face, and no one was coming near my family’s faces. Of course, all of them did it anyway, and they made a big fuss showing me the rainbows that stretched from one side of their faces, across their foreheads and down the other sides. They pushed their glittery cheek clouds toward me and told me I should do it, too. I screamed and cried and holed myself up in my room for the remainder of the shindig. Needless to say? A pretty bad birthday.

You mix together clowns and bananas and you’re looking at one catatonic Nicole. And both of these things are predominate in Clown Girl!

Now I probably just revealed a lot more about my psyche than I should have, but it should be a pretty good indication as to why I felt I had to read Clown Girl. Whether it was to succumb to my own fears or to tackle them, I’m not sure, but here we go.

Despite my initial awkwardness going into this novel, Clown Girl is really quite wonderful. It’s completely oddball, taking place in fictious, rundown Baloneytown, but it’s also quite touching. The novel centers around Nita, aka Sniffles the Clown, a girl with a heart condition who is awaiting the return of her beloved Rex Galore, who recently took off for San Francisco to audition for Clown College. In her beloved’s absence, she’s out performing in corporate tradeshows and car lot openings. Her clown boss, Crack, is trying to find the real money in clowning, which usually involves coulrophiles, or clown fetishists. Crack tries to set Nita up with clown dates, and their friend Matey moonlights as an S&M clown. Nita, however, is hellbent on being a clown for art’s sake and dreams of one day joining Clowns Without Borders, a sort of Peace Corps for clowns.

So yeah, oddball.

However, Nita is stricken with abandonment issues: her parents died when she was a teenager, she recently lost Rex’s and her child, and Plucky–her beloved rubber chicken with a heart on its chest–has gone missing. Now she’s desperate for Rex to come home, and she’s completely blinded to his affections or intentions with her. She meets a cop, Jerrod, someone who she shouldn’t be hanging around with, and finds a sort of connection with him. They each play a role, and neither find comfort being outside that role.

What’s really amazing, though, is how effortlessly Monika Drake blends the insane and the heartfelt. It would be easy to treat Nita as a lunatic, but Drake gives her grace, even when Nita is putting together her Juice Caboosey act, which involves wearing giant sandbag breasts and a bum while juggling lit torches, and nearly burns her house down. However, Drake has Nita acting like a looney because Nita has such high hopes for herself but has no idea how to attain them. It really is that pull between humor and seriousness that makes this novel work so well.

Buy Clown Girl from Hawthorne Books.