What do you think?
Rate this book
The Planets
A collection of short stories, including the tale of a middle-aged bank president who seeks diversion with an office temp - a nudist and bald mime artiste who strips away all externals in her quest for pure truth. Other work by the author includes "Remind Me to Murder You Later".
- GenresFictionHumorLiterature
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1991
3 people are currently reading
226 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer Finney Boylan
31 books1,557 followersJennifer Finney Boylan is a widely praised author and professor.
Edward Albee summed up her oeuvre in 1988: -- "Boylan observes carefully, and with love. [Her] levitating wit is wisely tethered to a humane concern…. I often broke into laughter, and was now and again, struck with wonder."
Jenny's memoir, She's Not There, published by Broadway Books in 2003, was one of the first bestselling works by a transgendered American; until 2001 she published under the name James Boylan. She's Not There, currently in its eighth printing, is popular both as a textbook in high schools and colleges as well as with readers's groups. The paperback edition contains a "readers guide" in addition to the main text, which consists not only of Jenny's insights on "a life in two genders" but also includes an afterword by Pultizer Prize winner Richard Russo, whose friendship with James, and later with Jennifer, provides part of the books narrative.
She's Not There won an award from the Lambda LIterary Foundation in 2004, the year after its initial publication. The book has since been published in many foreign editions, and was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Anna Quindlen called it “a very funny memoir of growing up confused, and a very smart consideration of what it means to be a woman.”
Her 2008 memoir, I'm Looking Through You, is about growing up in a haunted house. While trans issues form part of the exposition of the book, the primary focus of I'm Looking Through You is on what it means to be "haunted," and how we all seek to find peace with our various ghosts, both the supernatural and the all-too-human.
Jenny has been a frequent guest on a number of national television and radio programs, including three visits to the Oprah Winfrey Show. She has also appeared on the Larry King Show, The Today Show and been the subject of a documentary on CBS News’ 48 Hours. She has also appeared on a wide range of local and syndicated television shows, as well as NPR's Marketplace and the Diane Rehm show. In 2007 she played herself on two episodes of ABC's "All My Children." She has spoken widely around the country on gender and imagination, at venues including the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and the New Jersey State Theatre. She has given plenary and keynote speeches at conferences on diversity and scholarship around the country, and at colleges and universities including Amherst, Wesleyan, Dartmouth, Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Bucknell, Dickinson, Bates, Ohio State, Middlebury, Gettysburg, Georgia State, the University of Puget Sound, and Westminster College in Salt Lake City. She has spoken at law firms, at corporate events, and at bookstores from Seattle to Vermont.
Her nonfiction has appeared on the op/ed pages of the New York Times, in GQ magazine, Allure, and Glamour. She is also an ongoing contributor to Conde Nast Traveler magazine; her most recent work there was on Easter Island, published in the January 2007 issue.
Boylan's first book, a collection of stories entitled Remind Me To Murder You Later, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. Her first novel, The Planets, was published in 1991 by Poseidon Press. (Simon and Schuster). Loosely based upon the classical piece of music by Gustav Holst, The Planets followed the lives of several fictional characters in the real town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which has been afflicted by an underground coal fire since the early 1960s.
Her second novel, The Constellations follows the lives of several of the characters from The Planets, some of whom flee from angry cows, discover a latex brain, and begin a life of dognapping.
Her 1997 novel, Getting In, published by Warner Books, focused on four high school students who go on quests to get into college. The novel was optioned for film by Renny Harlin and Geena Davis, and Jenny was tapped to write the initial screenplay for New Line Cinema.
Born in 1958 in Valley Forge, Boylan
Edward Albee summed up her oeuvre in 1988: -- "Boylan observes carefully, and with love. [Her] levitating wit is wisely tethered to a humane concern…. I often broke into laughter, and was now and again, struck with wonder."
Jenny's memoir, She's Not There, published by Broadway Books in 2003, was one of the first bestselling works by a transgendered American; until 2001 she published under the name James Boylan. She's Not There, currently in its eighth printing, is popular both as a textbook in high schools and colleges as well as with readers's groups. The paperback edition contains a "readers guide" in addition to the main text, which consists not only of Jenny's insights on "a life in two genders" but also includes an afterword by Pultizer Prize winner Richard Russo, whose friendship with James, and later with Jennifer, provides part of the books narrative.
She's Not There won an award from the Lambda LIterary Foundation in 2004, the year after its initial publication. The book has since been published in many foreign editions, and was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Anna Quindlen called it “a very funny memoir of growing up confused, and a very smart consideration of what it means to be a woman.”
Her 2008 memoir, I'm Looking Through You, is about growing up in a haunted house. While trans issues form part of the exposition of the book, the primary focus of I'm Looking Through You is on what it means to be "haunted," and how we all seek to find peace with our various ghosts, both the supernatural and the all-too-human.
Jenny has been a frequent guest on a number of national television and radio programs, including three visits to the Oprah Winfrey Show. She has also appeared on the Larry King Show, The Today Show and been the subject of a documentary on CBS News’ 48 Hours. She has also appeared on a wide range of local and syndicated television shows, as well as NPR's Marketplace and the Diane Rehm show. In 2007 she played herself on two episodes of ABC's "All My Children." She has spoken widely around the country on gender and imagination, at venues including the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and the New Jersey State Theatre. She has given plenary and keynote speeches at conferences on diversity and scholarship around the country, and at colleges and universities including Amherst, Wesleyan, Dartmouth, Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Bucknell, Dickinson, Bates, Ohio State, Middlebury, Gettysburg, Georgia State, the University of Puget Sound, and Westminster College in Salt Lake City. She has spoken at law firms, at corporate events, and at bookstores from Seattle to Vermont.
Her nonfiction has appeared on the op/ed pages of the New York Times, in GQ magazine, Allure, and Glamour. She is also an ongoing contributor to Conde Nast Traveler magazine; her most recent work there was on Easter Island, published in the January 2007 issue.
Boylan's first book, a collection of stories entitled Remind Me To Murder You Later, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. Her first novel, The Planets, was published in 1991 by Poseidon Press. (Simon and Schuster). Loosely based upon the classical piece of music by Gustav Holst, The Planets followed the lives of several fictional characters in the real town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which has been afflicted by an underground coal fire since the early 1960s.
Her second novel, The Constellations follows the lives of several of the characters from The Planets, some of whom flee from angry cows, discover a latex brain, and begin a life of dognapping.
Her 1997 novel, Getting In, published by Warner Books, focused on four high school students who go on quests to get into college. The novel was optioned for film by Renny Harlin and Geena Davis, and Jenny was tapped to write the initial screenplay for New Line Cinema.
Born in 1958 in Valley Forge, Boylan
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
Read
February 7, 2020a twin peaks comparison is not unwarranted here i think, & to be clear i don't mean just strange sinister things happening but rather the interplay b/w strange sinister events and melodrama -- you've got your pet rabbit thrown thru a window, sure, but also a cop who's haunted by the smell of his late wife's melted plastic rain hat. the former wouldn't be so unsettling in the absence of the latter, nor would the latter be so poignant absent the former. (& then as a 3rd element just uncategorizable fish-in-percolator style weirdness, like the outcast's mother's signature cocktail, the "irish listerine" -- coffee w/ listerine & whipped cream.) looks deceptively pretentious at 1st (it's structured after the holst symphony for pete's sake), but proves to be warm & welcoming, toxic mine gases & all
September 8, 2012
Cohesive chaos. Depressing hilarity. It's interesting, knowing that James truly was Jenny all along, to observe the duplicity the author creates for her characters. I read The Planets after picking She's Not There up for the first time since my human sexuality class in college. Finney Boylan writes poignantly with a dry and searing sense of humor and ease. This may be the fastest I have ever read a novel. I plan to devour anything and everything I can find by her.
June 13, 2007
This is one of those novels where no coincidence is too extreme, where characters from one chapter drop in out of the blue (literally) in the next, and where time has a wonderful elasticity that brings random events together in a sort of cosmic interrelatedness that suggests the movement of the planets. Out of print.
August 29, 2025
A very funny and well written book. Laughing out loud hilariously funny in the juxtaposition of accidents, occurences, serendip etc etc. And very well written.
Set in Centralia, Pennsylvania where an underground coal fire started in 1962 from the surface and is projected to continue burning for another 250 years.
Set in Centralia, Pennsylvania where an underground coal fire started in 1962 from the surface and is projected to continue burning for another 250 years.
December 21, 2017
If you like dark humor, you will love this book! I laughed out loud at least twice each chapter. However, when I would read the hysterical passages to my partner she didn't even crack a smile. You REALLY have to like dark humor to enjoy this book. Each adventure is totally absurd, and yet, you find yourself saying, "well, that could happen." Having read She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, I was eager to learn more about Jennifer/James writing. I loved this book and can't wait to read the sequel: The Constellations.
January 29, 2020
I'm not much for absurdist humor but this was a pretty fun read. It was more "silly" than truly absurd. But that also made the pacing slow--it felt like it was just a book to be humorous and I didn't care much how the plot went or what happened with the characters.
June 2, 2020
I'm usually turned off by overt quirk, but I enjoyed this tale of a skydiver who falls through a roof, interrupting a mime's tryst. There's always a logic to the quirk, a matter-of-factness -- the characters aren't ostentatiously precious about their quirks, they just are who they are.
February 6, 2020
Funny book. Had my fair share of laughs. Along with it, a captivating story which continues to build up and come together as it goes along
September 26, 2020
Too clever by half.
December 30, 2023
Purportedly humorous novel, very 1980s style of narrative, featuring a random collection of stupid white people. I tired of it long before the last page but managed to bull my way through.
May 30, 2024
Goes all the ways that surprise and delight. Wonderful, weird characters inhabiting a wonderful, weird space.
August 17, 2013
I put this book on my to-read list years ago after seeing something about it being a novel set in Centralia, the central Pennsylvania town that is largely abandoned because of a coal-mine fire that's been burning underneath the town since 1962. The author's name didn't register for me at the time, but when I went to check The Planets out from the library I discovered that it isn't just some one-off novelty book about a wacky locale - the author has since become far more famous for She's Not There.
The Planets is beautifully written and engaging, and it manages to be a book in which every character is deeply weird without, for the most part, feeling forced. Funny things happen, and a couple of the characters do skew a little too caricature-ish, but everything is just a little too sad or world-weary for The Planets to be a "funny book." We get a chance to see inside most of the characters' heads, and almost all of them are more complex than their friends, neighbors, and families give them credit for.
I went into this book without much more than curiosity to see what an author would do with Centralia as their location, and ended up getting totally sucked in. I haven't read anything else from Jennifer Finney Boylan yet, but I look forward to reading both She's Not There and more of her fiction soon.
The Planets is beautifully written and engaging, and it manages to be a book in which every character is deeply weird without, for the most part, feeling forced. Funny things happen, and a couple of the characters do skew a little too caricature-ish, but everything is just a little too sad or world-weary for The Planets to be a "funny book." We get a chance to see inside most of the characters' heads, and almost all of them are more complex than their friends, neighbors, and families give them credit for.
I went into this book without much more than curiosity to see what an author would do with Centralia as their location, and ended up getting totally sucked in. I haven't read anything else from Jennifer Finney Boylan yet, but I look forward to reading both She's Not There and more of her fiction soon.
January 6, 2025
Re-reading an old fave I haven't read since the late 90s. Wild. This book so 100% exemplifies who I was at that time, my taste, my humour. While I and my reading taste have changed somewhat, this still hit. Especially the absurdist humour. It's something that's so hard to get right and I think this book gets it. I'm pretty sure I read this back in the day bc it was recommended for fans of Douglas Adams, and that makes sense. This is general fiction, not sci fi, but the humour hits similarly. Fans of T. Kingfisher might enjoy this as well. And Kevin Wilson.
This is also the book that started my lifelong obsession with Centralia, and abandoned towns and mines in general. I love a book like this that throws in little offhand comments like "If life was going to be so stupid, it might at least have been enjoyable." A little bit of relatability amidst the chaos and absurdity. That's the key for this kind of book to work.
I've been wanting to re-read this ever since I enjoyed Mad Honey a couple years ago. I hadn't kept up with this author, and seeing her with such a popular book after 25 years was so cool! This would be more like a 4.5 if I read it for the first time now, but this was such a "me" book back in the day that I'm keeping it at 5 stars.
This is also the book that started my lifelong obsession with Centralia, and abandoned towns and mines in general. I love a book like this that throws in little offhand comments like "If life was going to be so stupid, it might at least have been enjoyable." A little bit of relatability amidst the chaos and absurdity. That's the key for this kind of book to work.
I've been wanting to re-read this ever since I enjoyed Mad Honey a couple years ago. I hadn't kept up with this author, and seeing her with such a popular book after 25 years was so cool! This would be more like a 4.5 if I read it for the first time now, but this was such a "me" book back in the day that I'm keeping it at 5 stars.
April 24, 2008
I started reading this book as part of my recent obsession with Centralia, Pennsylvania. This is a small town that has been home to underground burning coal mines since 1962. Much of the town has been bought out and bulldozed by the government. Oh, this is the nonfiction right here. It is stranger, indeed, than the fiction.
Secondarily, I read this book because it is the work of a trans lady, and it is not about transsexuals! Sometimes transsexuals can write about things that don't have anything to do with being a transsexual. I know, it might be hard to believe this, but she does it!
I like the quirky characters, the weird ways their weird lives tangle and untangle and tangle. it's a little predictable, and the plot relies too much on the weirdness of the setting & characters to push the story along, but the faults are forgivable. Some of the more subtle metaphors and obscure gestures were lost on me. One more thing, the cumulative weirdness made it sometimes difficult to suspend my disbelief and fall into the story, but when I found myself believing in the Outcast robbing banks with a burro, it was pretty magical.
Secondarily, I read this book because it is the work of a trans lady, and it is not about transsexuals! Sometimes transsexuals can write about things that don't have anything to do with being a transsexual. I know, it might be hard to believe this, but she does it!
I like the quirky characters, the weird ways their weird lives tangle and untangle and tangle. it's a little predictable, and the plot relies too much on the weirdness of the setting & characters to push the story along, but the faults are forgivable. Some of the more subtle metaphors and obscure gestures were lost on me. One more thing, the cumulative weirdness made it sometimes difficult to suspend my disbelief and fall into the story, but when I found myself believing in the Outcast robbing banks with a burro, it was pretty magical.
January 7, 2008
A fast read. The plot is almost too clever at times and I often felt like I knew where it was going long before it got there. The author managed to surprise me a few times though. The characters while definitely "quirky" weren't limited or defined by their quirks. Some went deeper than others but they all felt alive and I can see why he wrote a sequel for a few.
Not sure about the whole planets theme and the structure is supposedly based around some piece of music I don't know so I can't comment on that. It doesn't get in the way and if you were so inclined I'm sure you could use it to analyze it. I just like being carried along by the plot and the occasional bursts of playful language and interesting ideas about relationships and personal interactions.
Overall, probably not worth hunting too hard for (it's out of print) but definitely worth picking up cheap.
Oh, for the record it turns out that James Finney Boylan is now JENNIFER Finney Boylan and now writes memoirs and articles and appears on talk shows.
Not sure about the whole planets theme and the structure is supposedly based around some piece of music I don't know so I can't comment on that. It doesn't get in the way and if you were so inclined I'm sure you could use it to analyze it. I just like being carried along by the plot and the occasional bursts of playful language and interesting ideas about relationships and personal interactions.
Overall, probably not worth hunting too hard for (it's out of print) but definitely worth picking up cheap.
Oh, for the record it turns out that James Finney Boylan is now JENNIFER Finney Boylan and now writes memoirs and articles and appears on talk shows.
September 12, 2011
**This is one of my favourite books.**
The Planets is a fantastic mixture of funny and bizarre. I mean really really funny and really really bizarre*. I winced, I cracked up, laughed out loud, etc. I love how all the crazy random people and events all managed to come together in the end.
(The sequel is not quite as good, but still good.)
My edition is an older one, so the author is listed as James Finney Boylan.
* Demmie gives herself a shaving cream beard and plays electric guitar. Billings covers himself in newspapers to disguise himself as a ghost, but decides he'd better cut a mouth-hole so he can still sip his beer.
The Planets is a fantastic mixture of funny and bizarre. I mean really really funny and really really bizarre*. I winced, I cracked up, laughed out loud, etc. I love how all the crazy random people and events all managed to come together in the end.
(The sequel is not quite as good, but still good.)
My edition is an older one, so the author is listed as James Finney Boylan.
* Demmie gives herself a shaving cream beard and plays electric guitar. Billings covers himself in newspapers to disguise himself as a ghost, but decides he'd better cut a mouth-hole so he can still sip his beer.
February 27, 2008
A wild and wacky romp through a small town in Pennsylvania. The characters are an odd bunch of misfits, including a police officer in a wizards cape, an ex-con known as "The Outcast" who has a penchant for holding up hardware stores on donkey-back, a legal secretary who dislikes wearing clothes, and a batty old woman living in an abandoned school.
Boylan writes well. If you like the off beat, you will enjoy this book.
January 19, 2012
This is a super weird book. I read it because I'd been to Centralia in Pensylvannia and this book is set there. Centralia is a small town that is built on a coal mine, which caught fire and burned for AGES. The book is about some kind of weird relationships, and some strange goings on, not entirely sure what it is about actually - read it a long time ago. The second book in the series is less understandable and I think I (literally) lost the plot! Perhaps I missed something.
July 4, 2010
Wackiness ensues. If you've read any of Boylan's other books, you know what I'm talking about. Sometimes the pacing was a bit off, and I can't say I really I related that well to the various "everyman" sorts that populated the book, but there were more than enough clever situations and turns of phrase to make up for it.
September 18, 2010
This is one of the funniest books I have read (back in the mid 90's). Found it on a library shelf when I had run out of JG Ballard books to read and thought it looked interesting. I tried to look it up years later and found out that James had become a she after he originally wrote it - I have not read any of her other works but if they are as good as this one then I am in for a real treat.
October 9, 2011
This book needs to be made into a movie! It would be a hoot and a hit! James Finney Boylan is my favorite author and he is brilliant at character development. I actually missed the characters after I finished the book and I have enjoyed this book each time I read it. Now if I could only get it signed!
January 1, 2025
I read this book ages ago and while I couldn't remember the name or author, I've never forgotten some of the characters and events in it. Someone on goodreads managed to figure out what it was, from my description. I remember enjoying it quite a bit - think I'm going to try to get my hands on a copy and read it again.
December 8, 2013
Jennifer Finney Boylan (or James Finney Boylan on the older copy that I own) certainly comes up with interesting characters! This was an entertaining light read. Nothing profound about it, but very amusing characters.
October 24, 2012
Enjoyable screwball story.
December 26, 2013
Bizarre, engaging, at times very funny despite sad situations. Very intricate and deeply imagined.
December 5, 2013
As I grew up outside Philly, the scenes in familiar locations always tend to resonate. =) Phoebe Rocks!
May 1, 2016
Cute, clever and occasionally funny.
July 21, 2014
It's raining non sequiturs.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews