“The world of Tony Burgess is savage and blackly funny . . . It’s a place where you shouldn’t trust anybody, not even your narrator” (Uptown). Idaho Winter is a boy who, through no fault of his own, is loathed by everyone in his town. His father feeds him roadkill for breakfast, the crossing guard steers cars toward him as he crosses the road, and parents encourage their children to plot against him. That is, until he meets a young girl named Madison who empathizes with his suffering. But when Madison is attacked by dogs meant to harm Idaho, Idaho gets up and runs home, changing the course of the entire story . . . Idaho soon learns that his suffering has been cruelly designed by a clumsy writer who has made his book meaner than all the others to make it stand out. With this information, Idaho has become armed with the knowledge that the entire world is invented, and that he now has the power to change things—in a novel that is both “one of the finest parodies ever penned of the stereotypically didactic young adult novel” (Macleans) and “the most brilliantly terrifying dream you’ve ever had” (The Globe and Mail, Toronto). “[Burgess] proves himself to be a witty, lightning-quick conjurer of misanthropy in this brief, kaleidoscopic novel,” a nominee for the Trillium Award (Publishers Weekly). “An incredibly rich and thought provoking read about the theory of storytelling.” —subTerrain
