The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

October 10, 2005
Pratt (Little Gods
), praised for his short fiction, stumbles in his first novel. Marzipan "Marzi" McCarty, a 20ish California art school dropout, writes quirky comics. Marzi's also the night manager–barista of Genius Loci, a Santa Cruz coffeehouse decorated by vanished muralist Garamond Ray to hold in elemental Evil. The wild adventures that Marzi concocts for her cowpunk character, Rangergirl, start coming true after her artsy friends become obsessed with freeing weird gods. When the Outlaw, a representative of everyone's worst fears, busts loose from its surreal corral, the Desert Lands, it's up to Marzi, the new artist-guardian, to save the whole shootin' match from disaster. Pratt's simplistic message, glimpsed sporadically behind clouds of neo-hippie jargon, self-consciously naughty language, outdoor sex and nasty violence, is pretentious and even a little naïve—that art can trap our fears and hold them at bay. Like too much marzipan, it all turns cloying mighty fast, pardners.

November 15, 2005
College dropout Marzi (short for Marzipan) works the evening shift as a barista in a Santa Cruz, CA, coffeehouse. During the day, she draws her cow-punk/neo-Western comic book series, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. Things get interesting when Marzis art student friend, Lindsay, introduces Jonathan, a visiting graduate student researching the life of artist Garamond Ray, whose murals grace the walls of the coffeehouse. The trio ventures behind these artworks into an alternate world that resembles Marzis comic books. Garamond himself has been frozen in time by an earthquake in this realm. A psychotic collage artist and a woman turned into mud count among the menacing characters who combat Marzi, Lindsay, and Jonathan; a superhero outlaw figure also instills fear. Narnia meets Blazing Saddles in this debut fantasy novel featuring a fetching cast of desperadoes. For larger sf and fantasy collections.Keddy Ann Outlaw, Harris Cty. P.L., Houston

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2005
Marzi works at Genius Loci, a coffee shop in Santa Cruz, California, whose claim to fame is the murals in it, painted by Garamond Ray, who disappeared after the 1989 earthquake. Marzi also writes a neo-western comic called " The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl," in which the heroine battles otherworldly versions of the villains of westerns. When one of the shop's regulars shows up claiming to worship the god of the earthquake, and moments later a quake rocks the place, and Marzi sees an oddly dressed figure running off--well, then, things are clearly becoming strange. Life begins to imitate art too closely for comfort: a woman made of mud, part of a story in Marzi's comic, is wandering the streets trying to achieve her own mysterious goals, and the villain of the same piece--a primal force from the otherworld behind the locked door in the Desert Room of Genius Loci--turns out to want to destroy California. With Lindsay, a friend from art school, and Jonathan, who lives in Genius Loci's attic apartment while he is studying the murals for his thesis, Marzi travels beyond the possible into a grand and magical western, indeed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)