Told in a series of vignettes, Mickey is one young woman’s journey to figuring out life (or not) amidst drunken mistakes, reality TV marathons, bathroom sex, and the daydreamed titles of imaginary art installations.
Martin’s approach to narration on this subject, where the young woman simultaneously realizes both the logic and ill-logic of her behaviors, is where the novella finds its purpose ... Like the narrator, Mickey can be described in a myriad of contradictory terms. It’s funny, tragic, relatable, fantastic, dark but also, in its own unique way, weirdly hopeful.
For a book that is largely about the loneliness of a life lived through the distancing mediation of technology, Mickey is an arrestingly immediate and personal work ... [the] concise yet ever-unspooling structure evokes the reading of texts or tweets or status updates, building a similar tension to that found in scrolling and swiping ... If you enjoy futility, sarcasm, aggravation and art, then you will most likely enjoy this book as an excellent distraction from your own self-conscious and self-sabotaging brain.
Presented with brevity through a series of short vignettes, author and illustrator Chelsea Martin’s fourth book finds the humor in minor tragedies ... The writing, though engaging, can come off as stunted as some of the relationships described in the book, but there’s something to admire in that earnestness, even if it results in the occasional lackluster passage such as the convoluted opening.
