Toad

A Novel

By: Katherine Dunn, Molly Crabapple - foreword

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

"Delaine has the perfect deadpan narration that conveys the hopelessness of our protagonist."- Booklist

Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world.

She spends her days alone at home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the floors. Her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month. She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her own body, and her wayward early twenties, when she was a fish out of water among a group of eccentric, privileged young people at a liberal arts college. There was Sam, an unabashed collector of other people’s stories; Carlotta, a troubled free spirit; and Rennel, a self-obsessed philosophy student. Self-deprecating and sardonic, Sally recounts their misadventures, up to the tragedy that tore them apart.

Colorful, crass, and profound, Toad is Katherine Dunn’s ode to her time as a student at Reed College in the late 1960s. It is filled with the same mordant observations about the darkest aspects of human nature that made Geek Love a cult classic and Dunn a misfit hero. Daring and bizarre, Toad demonstrates her genius for black humor and her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque. Fifty-some years after it was written, Toad is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood and a powerful addition to the canon of feminist fiction.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2022 Katherine Dunn (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"A gentle, funny, heartbreaking indictment of the naïve excesses of the 1960s and the testament of a woman who survived them." —Kirkus, starred review

"A sobering look at the reality of what one’s glory days actually entailed, shot through with the unmistakable undertow of pain and self-loathing." —Publishers Weekly

“Toad is a gift to those of us who have been dreaming for decades of a new novel from Katherine Dunn, and a book that will bring her many devoted new fans. Nobody’s sentences heave and breathe like Dunn’s do. Her language scintillates and sheds its scales, revealing truths that nobody else dares to utter, or can. She is Portland’s bard of ‘the genuine wound,’ exploring the deep world within the body and the human animal’s capacities for savagery, tenderness, loneliness, friendship, loathing, and love.” —Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Orange World and Other Stories

Performance is bad

I am having the most trouble listening to this narrator. Her “take” on the main character is not at all sustaining for this book. Every. Single. Sentence. is dripping with the same tone of someone who is just reading words and not involved in what is happening.

love love love

do you ever finish a book and want nothing else except the story to continue??? i want more!!!

Fabulous

I’m so happy I came upon this author. I read Geek Love years ago, but will probably do so again. This story is unbeatable in its depiction of characters, who are fully realized and intriguing. The plot line is not meant to be the thing. This is about people—how and why they do what they do, and what drives them to gladness and madness.