Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Crazy Genie

Crazy Genie

Cagnati, Inès
Schillinger, Liesl

Paperback

General Fiction

Publisher Price: $16.95

ISBN13: 9798896230205
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Mar 24 2026
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.55 Width: 4.96 Depth: 7.95
Language: English
A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother--a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village--in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.

Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms to do what work there is to be done. When farmers and villagers greet her, she says nothing, and keeps walking. Once, she was a lighthearted girl from the best family in the valley; now they all call her Crazy Genie. While her mother works, Marie waits, yearning for her mother to notice her, longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.

Told in Marie's ingenuous, straightforward voice, Crazy Genie is the second novel by Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child's unconditional love and of society's callous prejudices, Crazy Genie, together with her first novel, Free Day, confirms Cagnati's astonishing power as a writer.

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