clown girl by Monica Drake

Ahh, the rustic splendor of Baloneytown. Where clowns struggle and scrape to make a living amidst squalor and illicit drug deals. Many of them yearn to produce high art, while most slip into an existence of alcoholism, drug dependency, and prostitution. Enter Sniffles, our protagonist. She's a sad sack of a clown who's not having the best of luck. Her clown paramour Rex Galore has traveled (on money borrowed from her) to San Francisco to try to make it into clown college. She's just had a miscarriage, and even worse - she's lost her rubber chicken!

Drake embues Sniffles with a great deal of pathos, and she saves the story. Most of these scenarios, I'd stop reading about thirty pages in because of all of the misery, emotional angst, and broken-heart-tragedy of the story. When it's done poorly, it reads like a Bizarro-version of Sex in the City (which I hate enough in the normal universe). With Drake, the story absolutely soars. You can't help but feel for Sniffles as she makes mistake after mistake, trying to get her act together, and working like Hell to make something of herself.

The unique setting and likeable characters only add to the joy of the story, as a clown redeems herself and discovers that there's more to life than rubber chickens and fire juggling. More even than finding true love. Sniffles is on a quest to accept herself, and she discovers that everyone's wearing a costume, and that all the world's a stage - but does she (or can she) fit?