The New York Times: "An absurdist comedy of suburbia."

TREASURE ISLAND!!!

By Sara Levine

172 pages. Europa Editions. $15.

Some people live by the Bible. Ms. Levine’s unnamed narrator, an aimless 25-year-old college graduate, is born again when she reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure book for boys. But somehow her fundamentalist reading of the text steers her wrong. Amid a friend’s concern that she has stopped taking her Zoloft, she buys a parrot whose interminable beak grinding at night leads to a grisly act of birdocide. She stashes the body in her parents’ freezer until: “One day I pulled open the door and, past the ice cube trays, stacked up high like a cemetery wall, I saw him there — a little hoary with frost, but visibly Richard, recumbent on three bags of edamame.” Alas, Richard isn’t her only victim in Ms. Levine’s debut, an absurdist comedy of suburbia.