The Constellations - Softcover

Jennifer Finney Boylan

3.53

55 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747521190 ISBN 13: 9780747521198

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1995

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In Centralia, Pennsylvania, smoking and aflame since 1962, because of its inextinguishable underground mine fire, an unlikely group of local citizens embark on a bizarre odyssey which involves a tattoo parlour, a sculpted human brain, a decaying dog and a cement mixer.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Boylan's comic sequel to his 1991 debut, The Planets, offers some delightful scenes, but a lack of narrative structure and a tendency toward excessive silliness skewer his saga about a crew of oddballs and misfits in suburban Philadelphia. The central character in Boylan's group of zanies is Phoebe Harrison, a troubled teenager who abandons a heavy-metal persona to fit in as a preppy at her new school while she tries to deal with madness in her life. Her uncle Pat is having an affair with Isabelle Smuggs, a sculptor with a flair for the macabre, while Phoebe's stepmother, Vicki Ambrasino, is involved in a fling with Duane, the older brother of Phoebe's dense boyfriend Duard. Boylan's characters couple, break up and chase after one another at a dizzying pace, and, although there are several promising subplots, the author hasn't stitched them together into a coherent plot. He does have a gift for comic incidents and absurd dialogue-the better scenes include a canine kidnapping and a local concert that climaxes when a runaway cement mixer plows into a house-but even the comic scenes are uneven; for every entertaining vignette, there's a sequence in which goofy dialogue and non sequiturs get out of control. While the small cult that formed around Boylan's earlier novel may find this effort satisfying, the loose plotting and adolescent humor may try readers' patience.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Boylan's entertaining and humorous sequel to The Planets (Random, 1992) continues the zany adventures of the Harrison family and their friends in Centralia, Pennsylvania, where an underground mine fire has been burning since 1962. Fifteen-year-old Phoebe Harrison is taking a trip to a tattoo parlor with Dominique, Phoebe's punkish role model, and Duard, Dominique's boyfriend. Along the way they stumble upon a sculpted latex brain. So begins an offbeat, satirical view of the lunacy of life through the eyes of a carnival of characters. Boylan succeeds in depicting the poignancy of Phoebe's struggle to fit in, punctuated by dramatic changes in her hair color and style. The action culminates at a school dance where everyone is quixotically brought together in an uproarious sequence. Recommended for fiction collections in all libraries.
Stacie Browne Chandler, Plymouth P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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