Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep


Posted on May 22, 2009
By Tanya Turgeon

 

REVIEW by Tanya Turgeon

Akashic Books, 2009
250 pages
$15.95

    If you're heading out to the beach this summer and looking for a book to pass the time, skip the grocery store romance novel and instead lose yourself in Maggie Estep's newest work of fiction, Alice Fantastic.

    It may not have the perfect bodies (Alice sometimes doesn't shower and Eloise suffered a crushed pelvis) of a paperback with scantily clad models on the cover, but Alice Fantastic definitely possesses a fantasy world of its own. Here a woman has become a millionaire from falling in a city manhole and blended beasts (imagine a cockroach body with the head of a dog) are made as children's stuffed toys. Still, there's no shortage of passion as Estep's complex and twisted characters go beyond the clichés to find love that is honest and real.

    Dogs are everywhere in this world. They are part of the scenery, the cast, the atmosphere. It is not really about them, which is a nice change of pace, but their presence pervades nearly every page. The easily labeled pack of misfits includes Mickey the skinny spotted pit bull, Carlos the one-eyed toothless chihuahua, Ira the three-legged hound mix, Candy "the trailer trash dog", Herman "a very shy sheepdog who just wanted to love somebody and detested excessive exercise", Jimmy the newfoundland mix, Rosemary the german shepherd "who wished dismemberment upon all squirrels", Lucy the ibizan hound, Simba the "aging black Lab" and many others.

    These rescued mutts are an exact reflection of the dysfunctional yet functional family of Alice, a semi-hermitic professional gambler dating a guy living out of his van; her half-sister, Eloise, whose boyfriend died in a failed stunt off the Queensboro Bridge and their mother, Kimberly, an ex-drug addict lesbian fostering sixteen dogs in her Woodstock, NY home. Just like the dogs, these three women have survived tough times only to come together despite radically different personalities.

    At times Alice Fantastic can seem overly rich in urban stereotypes but those having spent some time in the colorful city of New York know these people can and do exist. The eccentricities of life in the Big Apple emphasize the importance of family, comfort, companionship, and acceptance in one's life-things generously offered by the rescued dogs. "I already depended on his dogness. His solidness. I needed him." And with this simple statement the characters are suddenly accessible. After all, we all need a little rescuing sometimes.

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