Made for Love: A Novel Hardcover – July 4, 2017

I've been looking forward to this book all year and it did not disappoint. Alissa Nutting is a genius of the absurd, hilarious and straight up bizarre; she takes a sledgehammer to societal norms and never shies away from uncomfortable taboos.At 35 years old, Hazel abruptly leaves her psychologically abusive husband Byron Gogol, the multi-millionaire CEO of a monolithic tech company not entirely unlike (you guessed it) Google. With nowhere else to go, she moves in with her septuagenarian father and his newly acquired sex doll—a better alternative than staying with Byron, who has threatened to take control of her entire mind as part of an innovative new experiment.Meanwhile, a handsome conman named Jasper, who relies on his Jesus-like appearance to scam wealthy women into falling in love with him, has a near-death experience in the ocean one night and from that point forward can only be sexually aroused by dolphins. (Yes, you read that correctly.)With Byron spying on her move and threatening to harm her loved ones, Hazel grows increasingly desperate to escape his grasp for good. Ultimately Hazel and Jasper's storylines intersect in a surprising but strangely logical way, and it turns out they may be able to save each other.Made for Love is an delightfully odd trip from the opening sentence to the final page. Nutting's unrelenting strangeness and deviance isn't for everyone, but it is certainly for me. I ate up every last word. Beneath the entertaining absurdity is smart commentary on the intersection between technology and human connection, and a poignant dismantling of the cultural norms we come to expect from stories about love and relationships.

Those who take themselves and their books super seriously, be warned...this might not be the book for you.However, if you are a fan of bizarre books, appreciate dark humor, and can see past super weird stuff to appreciate the profound lessons about humanity underneath, you're going to want to read Made for Love by Alissa Nutting.The premise of this book alone is completely outlandish, and everything just gets kookier as the story progresses. Made for Love follows the stories of two dysfunctional characters--Hazel and Jasper. Hazel has moved in with her father after leaving her husband Byron, the CEO of the most powerful technology company in the world, Gogol. The reader learns from the beginning that Byron and Hazel's marriage was far from conventional from the beginning, filled with an overwhelming sense of coldness and reliance on Gogol's technology. When Byron began taking steps to implant a computer chip in Hazel's brain to connect her every thought and action directly to his own mind, Hazel fled, knowing that Byron would do whatever possible to find her and bring her back. The book begins with Hazel's appearance at her widowed father's senior living trailer park and her discovery that her father is in a very committed...and very kinky...relationship with a lifelike sex doll named Diane.Strange, right?That's not all.The other character in the book is Jasper, a con artist who makes women fall in love with him and give him their life savings before breaking up with them and disappearing from their lives. His career comes to a crashing halt when he has a freaky encounter with a dolphin that leaves him solely sexually aroused by thoughts of dolphins and completely unable to become turned on by humans.I warned you.Luckily for me, I LOVE books with crazy plots and super strange characters, and no sense of humor is too outlandish for me. I have read almost every single Christopher Moore novel at least twice, and Made for Love reminded me a lot of his books. (Side note: If you have never read any of Christopher Moore's books and want to laugh out loud until your sides hurt at books that feature totally bizarre plots, check him out. Start with Practical Demonkeeping or Lamb, for sure!) The plot and characters were eccentric, to say the least, but they were also richly drawn and wildly creative.Although those eccentricities were incredibly far-fetched, Alissa Nutting has written them in a way that draws readers in and makes them forget, for just a moment, that they are reading a piece of fiction. All of the characters are deeply flawed and a bit difficult to like, but they all feature elements that finds readers sympathetic to them. Hazel just wants to be loved but has self-destructive tendencies, Hazel's dad just wants to enjoy what's left of his life, and Jasper has deep abandonment issues. And once readers move past the wild plot and begin to see the deeper issues at work, this becomes much more than the entertaining, (darkly) humorous, bizarre book it seems to be on the surface. Instead, this book reveals itself as a compelling and engaging look at humanity and raises important questions about the lengths we are willing to go to in order to feel important and loved and the role technology has in our lives.Seriously. If you appreciate all that is weird and strange, give Made for Love a try. You will be wildly entertained, more than mildly disturbed, and surprisingly enlightened.

Funny-- topical and insightful, I wish it was a bit more realized and filled out. Started out great, middle bits were entertaining, but by the end it sort of deflated like a month old birthday balloon. Some points I felt were almost lifted from "Fifty Shades of Gray", which was the point, but it was kind of weird (I wish we could move on from that dang book). Hazel's dad was by far my favorite character. Some parts were pee-your-pants funny, other parts made me think, and towards the end, it made me feel "eeehhh,"Edited: Read "Tampa" over the weekend. I liked Hazel in "Made for Love" better than Celeste Price in "Tampa" but neither woman felt particularly "real" to me. Both of Nutting's female protagonists (I guess?) are very one-track-minded and not particularly well-rounded, neither had any real redeeming qualities. Both characters had a fetish and Nutting laser-focused their stories to their respective inevitable conclusions, with neither character seeming to learn from her experiences, except that she can keep doing what she was doing, more or less, to the same effect. Now I feel like I should write a book report....

I pre-ordered this and devoured it as soon as I got it. Alissa Nutting's writing always blows my mind. It is weird and hilarious and highly quotable, but also it totally messes with my reality for a few days. A few months later, as Amazon reminds me that I never reviewed this amazing book, I find myself wanting to drop everything and reread this and her other books. Every time I see it on my shelf, I want to reread it.I did have a few people judge me for carrying around a book with this particular cover, which looks sort of like it might be a cheesy romance novel. I found myself apologizing for the cover a few times, insisting that it's not what it looks like. It's so much better. Do not be fooled by the awesome yet potentially misleading cover.

This book is bananas. Took a little bit to get into it, and I can't say it ever got GOOD or anything, but it was entertaining and very, very different. Also, bananas.