Make tracks for irresistible 'Mosquitoland'
David Arnold's debut novel Mosquitoland is for anybody who ever needed to slap on some war paint to get through the day.
At times heartwarming, heartbreaking and hilarious, but always maintaining a distinctly innocent brilliance, Mosquitoland is a grand coming-of-age introduction to Mim Malone. She's a lovably quirky 16-year-old armed with a tube of lipstick and moxie to spare as she sets out on a 947-mile road trip to Cleveland to visit her sick mother.
She is a heroine, she is a hot mess, and more importantly, she is a hoot.
But, as Mim tells the reader in the first sentence, she is not OK. Her parents' recent divorce has placed her in Jackson, Miss. — a town she mockingly refers to as "Mosquitoland" — with her dad and stepmom. They're all for putting her on prescription drugs since she is acting out against everyone and acting way too strange (at least for them).
The heated situation hits a breaking point when Mim finds hidden letters from her mother. The teenager takes off on a modern-day Homeric odyssey to Ohio via Greyhound bus and beat-up pickup truck, meeting a load of oddballs along the way.
Some are worse than others — from a poncho-clad creep to a feral, schizophrenic homeless teen — but she finds allies, too. Mim first befriends an old lady with a mysterious wooden box, but her life wholly changes when she meets the mentally challenged Walt and the hopelessly dreamy, college-age Beck.
Arnold proves his worth as a top-notch storyteller on his first literary go-round, which is reminiscent of Ferris Bueller's Day Off if done by John Hughes with Jack Kerouac. And he has a gift for giving nuance to the ordinary, as in when Mim remembers a run-in with a tall man who smells of cheesy Kraft Singles, "like milky and sweet and sticky or something."
The author distinguishes himself in the young-adult landscape through the opinionated and obsessively individualistic Mim. It'd be wrong to simply call her a really strong female character. Anyone who uses her mother's old makeup as Native American-style war paint — applied in OCD fashion, no less — in tackling life's little battles deserves better than that.
She's a literary force of nature who has no patience for jerks or anybody named Ed, a role model for youngsters whose sense of adventure goes beyond updating their Facebook status, and a spirit animal for those holding this book and recalling their own days of being an outsider.
She falls in love in a poetically epic fashion, as described in Arnold's florid prose. There is a "jellification" of her heart in one romantic circumstance, but nothing lurid or Fifty Shades-y. The raciest it gets is Mim's growing smile, which starts in her stomach and weaves "up through my chest and arms, shoulders and neck, before blossoming in my face." It's corny as heck but, man, does it ever work magically here.
Mosquitoland stings in all the right places, which is why it will no doubt be many teenagers' new favorite book and win over the crustiest old-timer, too.
Mosquitoland
By David Arnold
Viking, 352 pp.
4 stars out of four