Trip

Raw and funny, yet graceful and astonishingly precise, Trip is a book with the power to resonate in the most intimate ways for any reader. I read it in awe, as if Barrodale had written it just for me -- Ottessa Moshfegh Amie Barrodale’s Trip is an extraordinary novel. It is as if Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson have joined together to write a tender story of a recently dead mom who wanders the bardo but is always drawn back to her imperiled son, an autistic teenager who is on a boat with a stranger, lost at sea -- Akhil Sharma Trip is an extraordinary novel. I’ve read nothing like it. It is crazy, wise, sensitive, funny, and terrifying — all those things put together so fluidly you can’t pick one apart from the other. Like all the best physical, chemical, emotional, and existential trips I’ve taken, this one blows the mind and shocks the heart -- Christopher Bollen The wild and quirky debut novel from Barrodale ranges across two continents and the afterlife to tell the story of a mother and son’s failure to connect . . . Trip’s adventure story is great fun, and Barrodale’s depiction of the afterlife is amusing and wonderfully surreal. It’s a hoot * Publishers Weekly * Blending humor and Buddhism, Barrodale’s debut novel will resonate with fans of afterlife fiction * Booklist * A rather unstoppable read . . . Barrodale is incredibly skillful at evoking a wide range of emotions in a limited span of pages. Though dark, the novel is packed with wit and humor, and comes to a surprising conclusion that will especially satisfy parents who have attempted to impart a life lesson to a child. Trip is as absurd, tender and moving as life itself * BookPage * A transcendent and dazzling weird novel about disconnection and difference * New York Times * Hilarious and intelligent . . . Through the warmth and intensity of the mother-son bond in Trip, Amie Barrodale illustrates why it takes most of us thousands of lifetimes to let go * Chicago Review of Books * Much of the novel’s emotional heft comes from Barrodale’s portrait of Sandra as a mother trying, from beyond the veil, to resume the role she inhabited in life. Her memories of Trip—his innocent questions, his tiny rebellions, his larger eruptions of anger—are precisely drawn, and the neurodivergent child is rendered with loving clarity . . . Trip doesn’t tug its protagonist into the afterlife; it loops her back and back into the bewilderment of living * Washington Post *