The Freddie Stories: With the Great Marlys! and Sister Maybonne | Lynda Barry

The Freddie Stories: With the Great Marlys! and Sister Maybonne | Lynda Barry | Tragic, Poetic

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The Freddie Storie...

	The Freddie Stories: With the Great Marlys! and Sister Maybonne Lynda Barry Sasquatch Books, 2002 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Here is the first new collection of Lynda Barry's nationally syndicated cartoons in three years. The Freddie Stories, featuring sisters Marlys and Maybonne and their spunky little brother Freddie, continues Barry's brilliant, raw, and original exploration of youth, coming of age, friendship, attitude, and being in the world.

Recognize greatness in whatever form it takes

Lynda Barry is one of this nation's great writers. Many readers won't see her dazzling brilliance because they are distracted by her cluttered, sometimes messy cartooning. The pictures and words work together though, as does her unbreaking four-panel format, to create not just a fine comic, or a good book, but high literature and great art.

Freddie is a boy to whom, to put it bluntly, terrible things happen. In this wrenching novel he is beaten, abused, humiliated and ignored. At the depth of his wretched misery he drifts from his own body, and spends some time watching people watching the boy who looks just like him. Only his sister, Marlys sees that something is not right, and with the help of love, an amazing entity and a secret language, struggles to bring him back.

This amazing story is filled with monsters and gods, magic, dreams, and nightmarish horrors. It's villians are horrible; psychotic teens, mad, bullying classmates and emotionally twisted Moms. It's heroes -- Marlys, Spaz-Eyes Gigi, and Freddie himself -- are incredible.

Don't be put off by scribbled, cluttered panels, or the cartoon nature itself: This is one of the greatest novels I have read, and look forward to reading it again and again.

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Tragic, Poetic

I've been a big fan of Lynda Barry's cartoon-format books. This is certainly the darkest, most poignant one. It deals with the character Freddy,an odd child who tries to cope with his outcast status by boldly embracing his oddness and eccentricities. However, as is the case with all of Lynda Barry's cartoon books, the theme that people can be cruel and exploitative of weakness, particularly in childhood, takes over. The mother, who obviously suffers from an undiagnosed major depression, takes out her life's discontent on him; a sadistic classmate and an unsympathetic teacher further poor Freddie's descent into mental illness, which becomes fully manifest after recovery from a near-fatal illness (which, to drive home the point about the complete lack of love and attention this child so desperately needed, occurred because his babysitting sister was too busy getting stoned to realize he was falling into unconsciousness with fevers). The ending is painfully tragic, almost too difficult to read. What makes this book, like all of Ms. Barry's books, so fantastic is the recollection she has of how people of this age group talk. The choice of words, the cadence of speech, are written as if they are taken from a diary of a seventh grader. What I love about these books is we can all relate to some aspects of these stories to some extent through our own experiences, and other aspects vicariously (remebering a friend's mother or father who was neglectful or abusive), and the writing style makes it that much easier to get into that frame of mind/reference when reading the book. One takes away from these books (this one in particular) both a sense of nostalgia for childhood, as well as a realization that it wasn't always as wonderful as we remember; there were bad times too, and in many ways, we are lucky to not have had to endure what so many others like Freddie went through.

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What a great and scary place the world is...

It is hard to write a review of a Lynda Barry novel that would do justice the greatness she puts in her books. All Barry's characters are full of life and life problems, some more optimistic than others. The Freddie Stories is a collection of comic strips in the same world as The! Greatest! Of! Marlys! It is much darker than the novel about Marlys and her shining personality. Although it made me cry at the end at the saddness of humanity (and all cheesy phrases like this), The Freddie Stories is an excellent read, once again dazzling with Barry's art, wit, and humor. A must read for Lynda Barry's fans.

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my favorite of the lynda barry canon

The Freddie Stories is my favorite of all The Funk Queen of the U.S.A.'s work, and that INCLUDES 100 Demons--no small feat. Barry's masterful handling of some very dark subject matter floored me.

Gets real without being a total downer...the magic is there.

I avoided this book for years, even though I'm a Lynda Barry fan, because I was afraid it would be too wrenching.

But I finally got up the guts to take it down off the shelf. I took it on a weekend retreat with me, and even after I'd read it all the way through I kept looking at it all weekend. The way the language and the lettering and the pictures all went together. The story it told.

Bad things happen to Freddie, definitely. He ends up with some mental problems, as noted matter-of-factly by Marlys. He does not have the most supportive environment in the world, but he does have allies. And he has a voice, the voice of this book. Under Lynda Barry's fingers, that's enough for this to be a book of hope and beauty, no matter how dark it gets.

The book is made of several stories, each happening over multiple four-panel spreads. Altogether it is the story of a year in Freddie's life, with glimpses of Marlys and Maybonne too. So it's okay, in case you've been eyeing it like I did. Go ahead and hang out with it. Then, like me, you'll find yourself wondering at odd moments what's up with Freddie and Marlys and Maybonne these days.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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