Daniel Handler

Flannery Culp wants you to know the whole story of her spectacularly awful senior year. Tyrants, perverts, tragic crushes, gossip, cruel jokes, and the hallucinatory effects of absinthe -- Flannery and the seven other friends in the Basic Eight have suffered through it all. But now, on tabloid television, they're calling Flannery a murderer, which is a total lie. It's true that high school can be so stressful sometimes. And it's true that sometimes a girl just has to kill someone. But Flannery wants you to know that she's not a murderer at all -- she's a murderess.

A Novel

The Basic Eight

avarni

her pearl necklace broke suddenly and all the pearls rolled down the stairs cooing like freed birds. V blinked at them; I can't even imagine what a drunken sight that was, in the full light of the house; all the pearls bouncing down stairs, family heirlooms lost forever in the Halloween dark.

My whole body buzzed like a microwave, except that microwaves don't buzz and my body doesn't plug in and make baked potatoes in ten minutes. What was I taling about?

"We're all better off without Adam. We would have been better off without the original Adam. Who needs him? Just a couple of Eves in the garden would have been OK" 

"Yeah," Kate agreed, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. "If you and I had been in the garden, Flan, we would have left the fucking apple the hell alone!" 

She spun the car through a right turn that would have killed us all had we been minor characters.

When I woke up this morning I was already on the bus; don't know how I managed that.

She licked her lips and then wiped them on her hand, her dark lipstick staining her wrist like a suicide. "What has he done to you. What has he done to you."

"Have you forgotten who the famed Roewer Absinthe Poisoner is?" 

She grinned, finally relaxing, and turned to me as she ran a stop sign. "Poisoness," she said. 

"Poisonous is right." Our wit will preserve us all. 

"You know, love means a lot of things," she said. The first definition is 'intense affection'...But the last one is important, too. Last but not least. 'A score of zero."

I stood up and took a step into a large puddle of someone’s discarded cola. Evil corporate chemical sweeteners seeped in and began to soak my sock. The bus doors closed and the infant pulled away, whining and coughing. I had just realized I needed to be waiting at the other bus stop.

I didn’t feel the despair, like my shoes were filled with rain and I just figured out that I had been waiting at the wrong bus stop for an hour and a half and that Adam didn’t give a shit about me.

“To all of my guests, both frequent and infrequent,” Kate said, bowing regally to Flora Habstat and Adam. “May we generally be happy, generally be witty, generally be honest, but above all always be interesting.”

loud music during cooking,quiet during dinner. Immutable.

the evening was magical, magical, magical and I want to write it down before it evaporates into the night air like streams of sensual smoke.

I looked for V when I got off the bus, hoping that V’s gorgeous car could become a permanent morning motif, but as yesterday’s ride was added, as you remember, one year later in rewrites, V of course was nowhere to be seen.

 “Relax,” she said. “You will be wise. You’re young. You can’t have everything right away.”

Showing up early for her class and thus being alone with her felt like showing up early for Judgment Day and getting to hang out with the angels before the crowds arrive.

Idea for a story: A man falls in love with a woman and writes her letter after letter. We never read the letters she writes to him. His love grows and grows through the letters. He can’t stand it anymore. Then something drastic happens…but what?

So, over dinner with Maman, Jennifer Rose Milton conceived of the Grand Opera Breakfast Club, an organization so pretentious that no one but our friends would join it

“–and I go to Italy, the most romantic country in the world, and the only man who makes my heart beat faster is carved out of marble.”

Once I’ve started something, I have to finish it, no matter how bad it is.

the only way to really look at Italy is to stop gaping at all the Catholicism and just sit down and have some coffee.

Alexa M

3.5 but leaning towards 4 so rounding up... i think?? 
Daniel Handler wrote my favorite book of all time so i wanted to go back and give one of his earlier books a try and im glad i did! Flannery was such a great narrator and i genuinely laughed out loud many times. HOWEVER the reason it is not a full 4 is the end had probably my least favorite trope of all time.. so.. ugh. but yeah super easy and quick read glad i picked it up!

Jeannette Ordas

Meh, I'm just not a fan of Daniel Handler. This was pretty much a fan letter to Heathers it seems, with it's smarty pants & cliquey characters. I figured out the twist early on so there was no big reveal either. Oh well, a summer read.

A satire of teenage life follows cynical soon-to-graduate Flannery Culp on a raucous journey through high school in the 1990s, covering SATs, college applications, friends, boyfriends, tabloid journalism, and TV talk shows. A first novel.

Kali Nichta

What starts off as your typical teenage murder-revenge tale becomes complex when you realize that something isn't quite right...

Handler's ability to render the self-consciously pretentious prose of a smart kid is uncomfortably accurate.

Laura

I've never been a Daniel Handler or Lemony Snickett fan, surprising since I love morbid shit like the kind of books he writes. There's just something about his writing that's always kind of turned me off. I think part of the problem is that he's a very gimmicky writer- in this case each chapter ending in vocabulary and study questions-, that and his parodies or satires are too obvious to me to be funny. The reason why The Basic Eight didn't work for me is because it was trying so hard to be funny, and it wasn't like Handler was breaking new comedic ground by making fun of Oprah Winfrey or talk show moralists. 

I think also I encountered this book at the wrong time. It's soon to be 20 years old and it feels every year. Oprah's not as big of a presence as she used to be, people don't freak out of drug use in teenagers the way they used to, and now our travelling moralists are more along the same lines as Al Sharpton. It's not yet old enough to become a charming relic of the late 90s, nor does it have a certain timeless quality that makes it transcend its age. 

I want to go back to the unfunniness of it, which is likely The Basic Eight's biggest flaw. This is a failed stand-up comic of a book, with every joke leaving me staring blankly at the screen of my iPad waiting for the punchline. I can see that Handler was going for a Heathers kind of feel to the novel, but the reason why that movie survived through the years is because it focuses on and draws its humor from a topic as timeless as mean girls in high school. If The Basic Eight had taken its cues from that, the book's satirical punches probably would have actually landed.

Continue reading this review on my blog here: https://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/2...

The Basic Eight A Novel

Reviews

Highlights