I really enjoyed this very weird novel that takes us inside a young woman who is unusually concerned with her own interiority. It evolves into a meditation on consumerism, in the usual sense of shopping, but also on the more biological level of what we consume, as in food, and how it affects our bodies. The word the book is set in, with its Krazy Kakes and Wallies, is close to our own but somewhat stranger, and at first these surreal elements of Kleeman's world tickled me. But as the novel continued, I found myself more estranged by this stuff, as our narrator's experience stepped further and further away from what felt recognizable. It was still good, and interesting and funny and well-written. But I was, to be fair, probably less completely engaged in the second and third sections of the book than I was in the first.

I finished it, so there's that, but I didn't like it. May have been a brilliant short story or perhaps I don't like the genre. I usually like stream-of-consciousness, but I hated being inside this woman's brain. I found my inner dialogue keeping time with her endless jabbering about I don't even know, like, "Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!" Thoroughly unpleasant.

ok but i really want a kandy kake now

WTF did I just read?

i wanted to like this book, i even renewed it from the library but i just had to quit after 2/3 of the way through. it just didn't seem to go anywhere and except for one character, no one seemed to do anything. in the end it became a struggle to read it.

On the bright side, it did have the best satire of shopping at Wal Mart that i have ever read. even if it was too pretentious about what it's like to really shop at wal mart

Solid 3.5 stars from me. Published in 2015, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a surreal dystopian horror-lite (my own made up genre). The book starts normally enough with our tv commercial-obsessed protagonist worrying that her roommate, B, is trying to take her place and pondering her empty relationship with boyfriend, C, who is addicted to porn and a game show called That's My Partner . She can hardly focus on the problems at hand through the endless barrage of Kandy Kakes commercials.

Then her neighbors abruptly leave their house covered in white sheets with a strange message written on the garage. Cue the Wally's supermarket cult!

This book is WEIRD and jumpy and written with such dream-like prose you are lulled into a false sense of security. You think nothing is happening and then all of a sudden you wake up in a warehouse eating nothing but synthetic desserts.

YTCHABLM isn't subtle about the real life topics and concepts it intends to critique, and does so with such abstract directness that it somehow forces you to face even familiar ideas all upside down. Definitley an acquired taste.
An aspect of YTCHABLM that didn't cross my mind on the first read was A's relationship with identity, and more specifically with gender. I recently started to feel feminine again (whatever that means) in sort of the same way A does- almost as a reaction to environment and recognition/habit- which is what prompted me to pick this up for a second time. If you have a body, it must be molded to something right? Whether that something be a mirror and concoction of others' or your own creation is up in the air. It still held up as the fictional feverdream of an essay I remembered it to be, and a comforting one at that.

............. huh?


I understand the plot. I follow what is happening but there are some things that remain unanswered and that leaves me from loving this book. But it was on the creepy side of things and it was unsettling so it it scores high in that regard. And the title as it applies to the books is pretty clever.

I struggled so hard with this book. The premise and the reviews were so promising and, a quarter of the way through, I was really enjoying the quirkiness. Kleeman is an excellent writer and I loved the way she put her words together in these beautiful sentences.

And then I lost it. Yes, commercialism is bad and body image is bad and we're all searching for ourselves. It was like being beat over the head repeatedly, like some whack-a-mole. Just when I thought it was safe and a new idea was coming, WHACK!!

The entire middle was this struggle.

I'm glad I slogged through because something finally happened and the end gave me hope. It's a weird and twisted hope but, nevertheless, it's there.

A for effort but...not as fantastic as you would hope. You know how sometimes there is an actor that everyone swears to god is fabulous, but all you see is them "acting" in every role? Yes, that is what this book is like.
Not at all provocative to me.