Eggshell Palace

by Poe Ballantine

Nineteen-year-old Todd Whipple can’t get a job, a girl, or even finish a class in college. Neither pot-smoking nor dressing up in his mother’s clothes has done anything to pull him out of his Peter Pan Pickle. Fortunately, his father, the psychology professor, makes the correct diagnosis and kicks Todd out of the house. Entirely unprepared for a world outside his television set, the only person Todd can think of who might help him is his drug-addicted childhood friend, Archie Lococo, who gets Todd a job delivering pizzas at Caruso’s, a Mafia-owned restaurant downtown. Todd, a scaredy cat with no sense of direction, might be the worst pizza driver of all time. He also falls in love with a red-hot waitress with whom he has no chance. Then again, there’s always room for growth, and she does have a weakness for crime…

201 pages, Paperback

Published April 19, 2023

About the author

Poe Ballantine is a fiction and nonfiction writer known for his novels and especially his essays, many of which appear in The Sun. His second novel, Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, won Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. The odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer that populate Ballantine’s work often draw comparisons to the life and work of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac.

One of Ballantine’s short stories, The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue, was included in Best American Short Stories 1998 and one of his essays, 501 Minutes to Christ, appeared in Best American Essays 2006. [wikipedia]

Reviews

[David C. Reutter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sketchy characters

Read this and you inherit a bunch of throwaway friends. The narrator is comfortable. No matter what you wake up tomorrow and do it again. Things coming and going in the minds eye.

[Jamie Bruhn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fine effort by Poe Ballantine. If you haven’t read anything by this author, you ought to. He gets real life down to the detail. Maybe some can’t identify but I’ll bet many of us can whether we want to admit it or not.