The Average Human

by Ellen Toby-Potter

Book Overview

Every small town in America has one: the family whose daughters are perpetually pregnant and whose sons go directly from the eleventh grade to the county lock-up. In the town of Loomis, in rural New... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931561338
• ISBN13: 9781931561334
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

more please!!!

From the first sentence, I was hooked. This book opens with a rich, dark, descriptive force of the collective history of a small town-- especially of the family of "undesirables" at its center. Like all small towns, the life of the people in it becomes more entangled and ambiguous over time. Secrets grow interdependent, and what is truth or lies becomes more a question of perspective than of absolute certainty. In life, as well as in this book, what is often more interesting than secrets themselves is who keeps them and why.Ellen Toby-Potter tells this story in gorgeous language reminiscent of William Faulkner and Carson McCullers, and with equal pathos. Like both of those authors, she also identifies something about the way towns, and families, can become like self-protecting organisms, guarding their guilty members as much as their innocent ones.This book is strange-- strange and multi-faceted in the way people's lives really are. Toby-Potter pulled no punches and did not cave to either moralizing or to trite resolutions. When another author would have underestimated the reader, this one assumes that you have experienced the ambiguity of real relationships: that people's motivations are sometimes complex and unpredictable. In fact, she will even have you rooting, in spite of yourself, for the characters you should despise.What I want to know is, when is the next book coming?

Simply a MUST read!!

The Average Human is a fantastic novel. It has everything--fascinating characters and a plot that keeps you guessing. You get to see the underbelly of a community and the people who live there. I absolutely LOVED it. Ms Toby-Potter has a way with the English language. I can't wait to read her next novel!!

the darkest average human

This novel was amazing. I am not a fan of fiction, but when i started reading Toby-Potter's the Average Human I was completely enthralled by her mastery of language, and character development. It is a rich, dark novel with so many twists, you may feel as if yo uwill lose yourself, but everything comes back full circle. Everything ties itself back together beautifully and one is left with the imagery, the beauty and the tragedy of the town of Loomis. It's incredible that it is only her first novel.

Complex and compelling

I actually read "The Average Human" after first reading the author's book for adolescents, "Olivia Kidney." The two books are not really similar, but the writer's compelling, literary prose is equally excellent in both. The characters in "The Average Human," who live in rural New York State, are complex and not easily understood. Yet they are compellingly drawn and very memorable. Since I read this book, scenes and phrases from it have revisited me frequently. I will certainly read it a second time. Ellen Toby-Potter (or Ellen Potter, which she uses in the "Olivia Kidney" book) is truly a brilliant writer; I look forward to her next works for both young people and adults.

A stand-out debut novel

Ambitious, dark, atmospheric and sometimes as painful as it is hypnotic, Toby-Potters' first novel focuses a penetrating eye on an insular family of outcasts in rural upstate New York. Characterized by "innocent, irreproachable maliciousness," the Mayborns, once a large, rapacious clan of dairy farmers who absorbed the women and land of their neighbors, have grown increasingly shiftless over the generations. Now nothing is left of their holdings but a house, yard and dog run.Mayborn girls are born with black, shriveled fingernails, which the townspeople consider a mark of the rumored, unspeakable Mayborn sins, including, but not limited to, incest and infanticide. June Mayborn, 14, a pariah among her schoolmates, has fallen into an affair with Ed Cipriano, a shopkeeper whose wife is away. When the wife returns, June pays one last visit to the Cipriano bedroom where her heightened sense of smell assaults her with the stink of all three of them. To purify the air, she lights a fire, which burns the place down, incidentally killing Joseph, the terminally ill tenant in the next room.Toby-Potter manages to arouse both sympathy and repugnance for June. She is too self-absorbed to be pitiable in her loneliness, too amoral and creepy to be likable in her innocence and vulnerability. June is a hard-sell as a protagonist, but the death of Joseph brings some new blood to town. Joseph was guru of a hippie cult, which disintegrated after his affair with Iris, a beauty whose own self-absorbed amorality is more than a match for the Mayborns'. Iris and Joseph's son disappeared while in the care of Iris' young daughter, Lee, and he has never been found. Lee, now June's age, is as grounded as Iris is flighty, and as serious as Iris is hedonistic.When Iris lands in jail for snatching a child she thinks is her missing son, she has Lee put in the care of the Mayborns, her "relatives," a connection Lee flatly rejects until confronted with her sister June's black, twisted fingernails, identical to her own. Now, bereft of belongings and friends, Lee, dressed in June's clothing, feels herself succumbing to the Mayborn pull.Toby-Potter involves half the town in this welter of secrets, misfits and flawed heroes. She handles the large cast well, fleshing out her characters while retaining their mystery, allowing them to reveal themselves. The Mayborns are truly scary - too human to be despised, too brutish to garner sympathy. The story probes and prods and worms its way to a jolting, shocking climax and fitting, plausible resolution. With its gothic atmosphere, sharply drawn characters and flowing, understated prose, this is an impressive debut.