She meets Jocelyn with his (sic) eyeliner and layer of pink foundation; a genteel alcoholic; a chihuahua with jazz overtones; a runaway whose name I can't use in a family publication; and rather too many more. She reels into a high-tech, low-probability criminal plot.
Almost everyone is a caricature. They amuse you but only occasionally affect you. They have silly names (Andromeda Mountjoy, a New Zealand sheepfarmer called Barry Bunker, B. Sigmund Pappenheimer). Some suffer silly accidents. Some talk in silly foreign accents. Nearly all do silly things: leave cryptic notes on a urinal fence, use a chainsaw as part of their physiotherapy. Sherry's ingenuous, auto-didactic prattlings are endlessly energetic and intermittently tedious.
Her solitariness and otherness are her most attractive features, but get buried in the tsunami of slapstick, faux-naivete and silly-walks humour. You gasp for air and ordinariness.
It's a diversion - pacy, inventive, clever and accurate in the details, full of affection for its underclass protagonists. The good guys and good gals end happily; the other side ends farcically. Oscar Wilde pointed out that you can't really ask for more.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
