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by Ken Pisani
If you read only one hilarious novel this year about a guy who's forced to move back to his childhood home when his arm is amputated, make it AMP'D.
Aaron is not a man on a hero's journey. In the question of fight or flight, he'll choose flight every time. So when a car accident leaves him suddenly asymmetrical, his left arm amputated, looking on the bright side just isn't something he's equipped to do
Forced to return to his boyhood home to recuperate, Aaron is confronted with an aging father (a former Olympic biathlete turned hoarder), a mother whose chosen to live in a yurt with a fireman twelve years her junior, and a well-meaning sister whose insufferable husband proves love isn't just blind, but also painfully stupid.
As Aaron tries to make the world around him disappear in a haze of Vicodin and medical marijuana, the only true joy in his life comes from daily ninety-second radio spots of fun science facts: the speed of falling raindrops, batteries made out of starfish, and sexual responses triggered by ringtones - all told in the lush, disembodied voice of commentator Sunny Lee, with whom he falls helplessly, ridiculously, in love. Aaron's obsession with Sunny only hastens his downward spiral, like pouring accelerant on a fire. Pressured to do something - anything - to move his life forward, he takes the only job he can get. As a "fish counter" at the nearby dam, he concludes that an act of violent sacrifice to liberate the river might be his best, final option.
"Starred Review. Complete with painfully wry observations and delightfully caustic wit, this novel is a gritty exploration of what it's like to feel incomplete in the world. All five fingers up for this bitterly satisfying tale." - Kirkus
"Alternately poignant and wryly funny...Pisani's portrait of a disabled man self-deprecatingly embracing his own brokenness is oddly compelling and understatedly comical." - Booklist
"I don't like novels but I liked this one, which made me mad. And happy. Lots of mixed emotions here, if I'm being honest. Hilarious and heart-breaking." - Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Furiously Happy
"This is the sound of one hand clapping for AMP'D. Profane, sweet, funny." - Patton Oswalt, comedian and New York Times bestselling author of Silver Screen Fiend
"Brilliant. Great prose, great characters-vivid and really, really different. Astoundingly good." - W. Bruce Cameron, New York Times best-selling author of A Dog's Purpose and 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter
"All thumbs up....Amp'd falls into a tradition of voice: Vonnegut comes to mind, but so does J.P. Donleavy, Catcher in the Rye, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Fan's Notes. It feels like a modern novel with modern issues." - Joseph Monninger, two-time NEA fellowship recipient and author of Eternal On The Water and The World As We Know It
This information about Amp'd was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ken Pisani is a television writer and producer, playwright, comic book author, former cartoonist, and now, a novelist (Ken needs to learn how to focus.) He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife Amanda, and is allergic to dogs.
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