Poppy Shakespeare

The line between sanity and lunacy blurs in this ironic debut novel, a British import whose obvious inspiration is Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The narrator is ""N,"" a female patient in a London mental institution, a self-described ""dribbler"" whose ""mum was a dribbler and her mum as well 'cept she never seen her hardly, grown up in a home while they scooped out bits of her mother's brain, like a tater."" N, a 13-year veteran of the hospital, is charged with taking the newest patient under her wing, the eponymous Poppy, who insists there's absolutely nothing wrong with her. But Poppy soon confronts the legal bureaucracy of the mental health system and learns that in this Alice-in-Wonderland, off-kilter world she will have to feign madness before can prove herself sane. Is Poppy deluded or is government bureaucracy the source of society's ills? And are we, the people, mad for giving government the power to label us as insane or sane in the first place? Readers must navigate a working class British dialect as well as specifics about the British mental health system. But those who hang on for this often painfully funny, difficult ride will gain insight about love, friendship and human nature that only a crazy person can properly articulate.