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Cluck
Cluck is a darkly comic novel about Henry, an only child whose mother has bipolar disorder. As a teen, Henry becomes a radio junkie lost in the world of music. As a young man, he becomes obsessed with a female DJ whose evening show mysteriously beams out of Idaho and into his car while he’s driving over Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge. Henry has to live his life in the shadow cast by his mother, but he never completely gives up hope that he can find his place. Slowly, when he’s in his thirties, his life starts to open in positive directions, including sporadic success with chicken farming, outsider art (he calls himself a knit reactor), and romance. But, it’s not until Henry is in his fifties that his character is finally defined, but not without one final struggle with his own quirkiness.
306 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 15, 2016
15 people want to read
About the author
Lenore Rowntree
5 books4 followersLenore Rowntree's writing has appeared in several Canadian literary journals, including Geist, The Tyee, The New Quarterly, Room Magazine, and Other Voices. Her play The Woods at Tender Creek was produced in 2010 as part of the Walking Fish Festival in Vancouver, and her poetry was included in the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2010. She was shortlisted for a CBC Literary Award in 2009 for the essay "Flat Champagne," written about her sister's childhood schizophrenia. Lenore currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 6, 2019
I think this book deserves more attention. It's a really good mix of growing up with mental illness in the family, humor, relationships, growing as a person. It has a lot going for it including a quirkiness or weirdness I am fond of. I'm happy all around for reading it.
January 8, 2017
I’ve just finished reading CLUCK, a novel by Lenore Rowntree. Some will find it an unusual story, even a little strange in places. This is probably because the plot is extremely original, highly imaginative (there’s not a cliché or stereotype anywhere in the book), and its humor is of the black-comedy variety (satirical, ironic). Plus the characters (and their relationships) are so unique and interesting in offbeat, quirky ways, that you want to keep reading about them, and the surprising, harrowing, hilarious and often heart-rending things that keep happening to them.
People today like things cut and dried, spelled-out, specific: clear and in black and white, as some might say. There's a lot of grey in CLUCK. So many things can be taken in any number of different ways. As you’d expect in a book with the title CLUCK, chickens literally and figuratively are prominent throughout the story.
I loved the metaphors and running gags in the book around eggs/ chickens. Sometimes they’re as simple as a judge calling Henry, the story’s main character, a “dumb cluck.” Sometimes they’re the stuff of high drama: such as a major media sensation that turns Henry into an international star with one of his chicken-inspired creations. Sometimes they’re as poignant as Henry being “cooped up” in his mother’s house until he’s in his early thirties, because he can’t afford to “leave the nest” and find a place of his own.
CLUCK is that rare bird these days: a comic novel. Just when you’re thinking Henry’s goose is cooked, that there’s no way he can successfully extricate himself from another tough set of circumstances, Rowntree imbues him with the necessary pluck to cope, to work out a solution for himself and move on by not giving up, by standing up for himself, by maintaining a sense of humor toward the crazy predicaments all of us sometimes find ourselves in—three things Henry’s mentally ill mother managed to equip him with so the uncontrollable depressions and zany behavior that made her own life hell, won’t do the same to her son.
A fascinating story that holds one’s attention to the very end with its well-developed plot, subtle (nuanced) storytelling style and engagingly real characters, CLUCK has a charm all its own. It’s a fun, engrossing book that, at the end, left me smiling the way I always do when I hear that old joke about why the chicken crossed the playground.
“To get to the other slide . . .”
People today like things cut and dried, spelled-out, specific: clear and in black and white, as some might say. There's a lot of grey in CLUCK. So many things can be taken in any number of different ways. As you’d expect in a book with the title CLUCK, chickens literally and figuratively are prominent throughout the story.
I loved the metaphors and running gags in the book around eggs/ chickens. Sometimes they’re as simple as a judge calling Henry, the story’s main character, a “dumb cluck.” Sometimes they’re the stuff of high drama: such as a major media sensation that turns Henry into an international star with one of his chicken-inspired creations. Sometimes they’re as poignant as Henry being “cooped up” in his mother’s house until he’s in his early thirties, because he can’t afford to “leave the nest” and find a place of his own.
CLUCK is that rare bird these days: a comic novel. Just when you’re thinking Henry’s goose is cooked, that there’s no way he can successfully extricate himself from another tough set of circumstances, Rowntree imbues him with the necessary pluck to cope, to work out a solution for himself and move on by not giving up, by standing up for himself, by maintaining a sense of humor toward the crazy predicaments all of us sometimes find ourselves in—three things Henry’s mentally ill mother managed to equip him with so the uncontrollable depressions and zany behavior that made her own life hell, won’t do the same to her son.
A fascinating story that holds one’s attention to the very end with its well-developed plot, subtle (nuanced) storytelling style and engagingly real characters, CLUCK has a charm all its own. It’s a fun, engrossing book that, at the end, left me smiling the way I always do when I hear that old joke about why the chicken crossed the playground.
“To get to the other slide . . .”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews