Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins - It has beet!

While at a Dairy Queen in Hutchinson, MN, my book club group was brainstorming potential books for upcoming months.  A young woman wearing incredibly high heels said, "Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins; it's the best book ever!"  Being an adventurous sort of group we decided to follow her advice.  In keeping with my last attempts, I will give my review in a few...sentences that is.

The prose read like poetry.
The language was beautiful!
Intriguing characters abound.
Alobar and Kudra were the best.
I kept reading to see if they would find rest.
The search for immortality is intriguing to all.
Do a bandaloop jitterbug and you may never fall.
The search for the perfume formula needed to be found.
Throughout the book the sense of smell would abound.
Going back and forth in spaces and times made for quite the epic.
The character of Pan also lent the book a kick.
 I'll always think about beets differently now. 
Because from the beginning I thought,"What's the beet? Wow!"
Wisdom was sprinkled throughout
and sometimes my laughs were a shout!
Overall I guess I would proclaim
that Robbins deserves his fame.

If I were to see that nice young lady again, I believe I would have to thank her for the suggestion. I'm not sure if it's "the best book ever," but it was quite the adventure!

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.” 
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume