IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

A debut novel that taps the trauma of the streets to explore one woman's personal damage and the difficulty of relationships.

Moreno begins her story with what appears to be instructional pages from an emergency medical technician training manual. This clinical approach to emergency is in stark contrast to the personal angst in Piper Gallagher’s life. She has banged around Los Angeles aimlessly looking for love, a career, some sense to her mother’s leaving and death. An experience from her youth when she tried to save a hit-and-run victim by administering CPR informs her new life as a rookie medical technician, riding the ambulances through the carnage of South Central Los Angeles. She works hard, learns the ropes, stands witness to death, deals with her eccentric family, and eventually breaks down from the constant stress of quick decisions that fail to save strangers in need. There is a love story intertwined with the action, and Piper is inspired by the difficult adjustment of her lover, Ayla, to daily life disrupted by a brain injury from her tour as a soldier in Iraq. Moreno uses the stark writing of a medical text to contrast the messy reality of relationships and personal trauma. Her characters are real: the Irish father who never let go of his wife who left years ago and deals with loneliness through set-piece jokes; the emergency medical techs at Station 710 who make gallows humor and macho sexual puns between calls. When Piper shuts down, the writing becomes a powerful expression of depression—“I can no longer watch regular television. Violent crime shows fill me with a numbing terror; commercials enrage and horrify me.” She hides from everyone but eventually emerges, “…so very tired of being afraid.”

In this emotionally moving, well-written, engaging novel, Moreno strikes a profound balance between the clinical logic of trauma and the personal irrationality of a young woman dealing with her demons.