Sure to be shoplifted by teen delinquents, but also has a shot at adult cult status.
Teen girl troubles in the drug-addled suburbs of St. Louis.
Embree’s debut has roots in the punk-lit underground—drugs, disaffection, sex, violence and freakiness abound—but the weird innocence of its teen narrator makes it read like an uncensored YA novel. Angie is a fat, working class 16-year-old flirting with an eating disorder as she makes her way through adolescent terrors of identity and sexuality ratcheted up by drugs, isolation and violence. Her mother’s spoiled boyfriend has just moved in, and Angie’s best friend Shelby has declared she’s a lesbian. Angie and Shelby are relatively good kids committed to school, but when Shelby finds a girlfriend, Angie gets into trouble, alternately helped and hurt by her other friends. Embree assembles quite a cast: Heather, a sexy, one-breasted rich girl; Inez, the high school pot-head/dealer and guerilla performance artist; Carrie, a rich-girl anorexic with lesbian tendencies; Pike, a near-homeless teen dropout and sensitive artist; Troy and Mindy, two sexually sadistic rich kids; glamorous working-class Luann and her crystal-meth smoking hippie parents; and, most memorably, Shelby’s older sister Robyn, a tough-as-nails survivor who thrives on psychotic rage and deserves her own novel. Unfortunately, many of these characters remain mere sketches, as mysterious to the reader as they are to themselves. And while Embree casts a sharp eye on the complex lines of class and gender divisions (race is notably absent) that fuel the novel’s episodic violence, and raises fascinating questions about guilt and revenge, she allows Angie only a handful of insightful moments that are so moving and true, the reader can’t help but feel their absence elsewhere. There is the beginning of a much better book here, but readers who identify with the characters’ outsider status, or are drawn into the action as it rockets toward a climactic scene of Robyn-orchestrated retribution, probably won’t care.
Sure to be shoplifted by teen delinquents, but also has a shot at adult cult status.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-933368-02-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
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