A Little Bit Bad, the debut novel by Cassandra Neyenesch, starts with a man falling off a ladder. Reading this gleefully disorienting story, you’ll know how he feels. Neyenesch’s book is a little bit of many things, none of them bad ... Reads like Miranda July’s All Fours crouching over a domestic thriller. Neyenesch has a similarly hilarious take on the way cooped-up desire can ferment into an intoxicating hooch ... This zany novel crackles with spontaneity and absurd wit.
Neyenesch’s darkly funny debut splices a murder mystery with a torrid extramarital affair between a sleep-deprived new mother and her roofer ... The plot hinges on a very substantial twist, but the book’s real power lies less in the whodunit than in Perdita’s singular interiority and caustic humor. There’s much to admire in this off-kilter story of a woman’s midlife crisis.
