Book Review: Sherry Cracker Gets Normal

Book cover of Sherry Cracker Gets Normal by D.J. Connell. Photo / Supplied

Sherry Cracker Gets Normal by D.J. Connell
Blue Door $36.99

Cute titles. How do I feel about cute titles? I feel that the authors have to work a couple of degrees harder to justify them. New Zealand-born, Britain-based Connell works very hard indeed in her second romp - and with reasonable success.

The Sherry of the title works for a specialised gold-buying business. Specialised in as much as they buy the metal only in its used form, from dentists.

She's a seriously eccentric lass, with her Celtic fashion focus and her obsessively-maintained Observations File that makes up much of the book. She's a tad too eccentric for her boss, who offers her a career choice. Either she gets normal, or she gets a new job. She has one weekend and £100 with which to work things out.

So Sherry hits the dysfunctional, dissolute streets of a town where the local council operates on the "Every Swindler For Him/Herself" principle; where recession, retrenchment and resentment are the norm.

She meets Jocelyn with his (sic) eyeliner and layer of pink foundation; a genteel alcoholic; a chihuahua with jazz overtones; a runaway whose name I can't use in a family publication; and rather too many more. She reels into a high-tech, low-probability criminal plot.

Almost everyone is a caricature. They amuse you but only occasionally affect you. They have silly names (Andromeda Mountjoy, a New Zealand sheepfarmer called Barry Bunker, B. Sigmund Pappenheimer). Some suffer silly accidents. Some talk in silly foreign accents. Nearly all do silly things: leave cryptic notes on a urinal fence, use a chainsaw as part of their physiotherapy. Sherry's ingenuous, auto-didactic prattlings are endlessly energetic and intermittently tedious.

Her solitariness and otherness are her most attractive features, but get buried in the tsunami of slapstick, faux-naivete and silly-walks humour. You gasp for air and ordinariness.

It's a diversion - pacy, inventive, clever and accurate in the details, full of affection for its underclass protagonists. The good guys and good gals end happily; the other side ends farcically. Oscar Wilde pointed out that you can't really ask for more.

David Hill is a Taranaki writer.