In this Book
The University of Alabama Press
- Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: The University of Alabama Press
summary
Not only the story of a colossus of a woman living in Kansas, Fat Girl, Terrestrial is also a meditation on God, treachery, and blind love.
In Kingdom Come, Kansas, a town from which children once mysteriously disappeared, there lives a giant woman. Wallis Armstrong is not a pituitary mutant or a person battling a rare medical condition; she’s just an improbably large woman ill at ease in a world built for shrimps. Paradoxically, Wallis builds miniatures of crime scenes, and her specialty is staged suicides. She constructed her first diorama as a child when a boy in her fourth-grade class went suddenly missing. Wallis’s brother, Obie, believes the only explanation for his sister’s amplitude is that she is the incarnation of God on Earth, and he is her one true ardent disciple. Until he too disappears.
Kellie Wells’s story of Wallis’s odyssey through this tight-fitting world is a churlish meditation on the existence and nature of God as well as an exploration of the treachery of childhood and the destructive nature of the most blindly abiding kind of love: that of a love-struck brother for a big sister, a disciple for an unwilling prophet, and a bone-weary god for a savage and disappointing flock.
Table of Contents
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- Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Quote
- pp. i-viii
- One: Goliath Girl
- pp. 1-14
- Two: Moon River
- pp. 15-20
- Four: Walrus Disgrace
- pp. 25-32
- Five: Rudy in the Park
- pp. 33-40
- Eight: Die-O-Rama
- pp. 55-62
- Nine: The Hazard of Love
- pp. 63-68
- Ten: Reigning Planet
- pp. 69-76
- Eleven: Godmine
- pp. 77-82
- Twelve: Diviner of the Electrons
- pp. 83-98
- Thirteen: Darren Crenshaw Disappears
- pp. 99-106
- Fourteen: Darren Crenshaw Has a Sister
- pp. 107-116
- Fifteen: Vivica, Off Her Axis
- pp. 117-128
- Seventeen: Couvade
- pp. 147-164
- Nineteen: Oxtrot
- pp. 187-200
- Twenty: Three Trinitarians
- pp. 201-208
- Twenty-Two: Rabbit Catcher of Kingdom Come
- pp. 235-268
- Twenty-Three: Husband of Mary Alice
- pp. 269-284
- Twenty-Five: Egg of Eden, Sperm of Fate
- pp. 291-300
- Twenty-Seven: The Soft-Footed Phantom Speaks
- pp. 315-322
- Twenty-Eight: Hazard, a Guess
- pp. 323-330
- Twenty-Nine: Planet Suicide
- pp. 331-342
- Illustration Credits
- pp. 373-374
- Acknowledgements
- pp. 375-376
- Back Cover
- p. BC
Additional Information
ISBN
9781573668330
Related ISBN(s)
9781573661706
MARC Record
OCLC
823743559
Pages
390
Launched on MUSE
2013-06-27
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2012