Legoland [9780889226104]

Overview

Penny and Ezra Lamb are home-schooled by their parents on a hippie colony near Uranium City until the police discover it also happens to be the largest marijuana grow-op in Saskatchewan. “Legoland” is how their pot-smoking elders always described the outside world, and the Lamb siblings are dying to get there.

Once the commune is busted and their parents are sent to prison, sixteen-year-old Penny and her younger brother Ezra, each seething cauldrons of repression, are enrolled in a Catholic private school, where they are instant social outcasts. Penny, ostracized for being a weird “lesbo” (she’s not gay), is vulnerably but brilliantly depressive until a classmate gives her a copy of boy band Seven Up’s CD and she becomes obsessed with singer Johnny Moon. The self-absorbed Ezra, fixated on German nihilism, plays with his Jeffrey Dahmer puppet, wears white stockings and pops a mind-altering combination of Ritalin and Dexedrine to combat his ADHD.

When Seven Up breaks up, Johnny Moon remakes himself as a misogynistic gangsta rapper. Penny, heartbroken but determined to save him and bring back the “real” Johnny Moon, persuades Ezra to accompany her on a pilgrimage down to Orlando to confront her idol. The Lamb siblings run away from school on a bus tour of the Wal-Marts and McDonald’s of the continent, financing their trip by selling the Paxil and Ritalin they’ve been prescribed.

Arrested and deported for assault after their hilarious encounter with her pop icon, Penny has been ordered to give public service speeches to atone for attacking a celebrity. Dressed in a private school uniform and under the supervision of her social worker in order to avoid doing community service, Penny delivers her hyperactive sermon on juvenile delinquency, including a description of sex as “the Devil’s Pilates,” punctuated with the scattergun codas of her deadpan brother.