Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbor’s anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret. Now it’s three years later and Nando has been murdered.
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.
