Bad Marie (17 page)

P
RAISE FOR
Marcy Dermansky and her previous novel,
Twins

“[Dermansky’s] twins transcend…A brainy, emotionally sophisticated bildungsroman-for-two.”

—
New York Times Book Review
(Editors’ Choice Pick)

“Dermansky’s first novel embraces and transcends the coming of age genre by overlapping the stories of twin sisters…. Dermansky gives her misfits real dignity and avoids psycho-social clichés…while she neatly captures the girls’ suburban high school world with every telling detail. Sometimes despairing, sometimes blackly humorous, always engrossing and thoroughly original. A wonderful debut.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Fiercely energetic…. Dermansky’s pace is exhilarating, sending both Chloe and Sue, and the reader, rocketing through an adolescence studded with not-unfamiliar dramas…[Sue’s] self-imposed difficulties bruise your heart and make you laugh out loud all at once. Dermansky, who is not a twin, has nevertheless spun a dual spell, capturing the inner world of twins and tapping into our basic human longing to keep those we love most from growing and changing.”

—
New York Newsday

“Dermansky excels at depicting extreme emotional states and how we rationalize them.”

—
Village Voice

“[A] witty and slyly subversive take on the teenage American dream.****”

—
Daily Mail on Sunday

“Compelling, dark, and like a traffic accident that you try to look away from, only to find your gaze returning with odd fascination…. This well-written book gives readers a voyeuristic, insiders’ glimpse into the lives of not only twins, but teenagers…[C]omically and darkly entertaining.”

—
Denver Rocky Mountain News

“[A] startlingly beautiful love story about two very unlikely identical twins. It’s a joy—no, a thrill—to read…. This is easily the most detailed, disturbing, and lovable oddball romance you’ll ever read. Dermansky is a writer through and through.”

—Frederick Barthelme, author of
Waveland

“Entertaining…. Balanced by an overarching fable-like quality to this moving and well-written story of two girls learning to accept who they are.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Raw, extraordinary…. A dark, heartbreaking tale about adolescents trying to survive.”

—
Huntsville Times
(AL)

“Marcy Dermansky’s
Twins
is spectacular, weird, extraordinarily real, and funny in ways they don’t have names for. The perils of contemporary adolescence—from pill-popping to not eating to bad tattoos—are chronicled with an immediacy so intense it’s almost alarming. Dermansky inhabits her characters with a savage, hysterical eloquence. Her novel grabs your heart from the first sentence, and breaks it by the end.”

—Jerry Stahl, author of
I, Fatty

BAD MARIE
. Copyright © 2010 by Marcy Dermansky. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200006-4

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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