Part punk zine, part battle cry, this debut wields teen angst and riot grrrl rage like a spiked dog collar or a fist.
A once-ambitious teenage girl searches for her place in Los Angeles after enduring neglect and family tragedy.
Nikki Darling cuts class at the LA County High School for the Arts to drive around suburban Los Angeles in beater cars with her friends, smoking joints and listening to post-punk and riot grrrl bands. She’s a “brooding musical theater gal,” struggling with depression and loneliness behind a screen of tough talk and withdrawn behavior. But when a beautiful and mysterious student named Claire Chang is taken out of school after a supposed suicide attempt, Nikki grows worse, avoiding homework and stifling her aspiration to act. Instead, she pals around with a cast of endearing misfits who specialize in talking smack without saying anything at all. There’s Chelo, a loudmouthed stoner with red hair and thrift-store duds; Mike, a queer kid forced to sleep in his parents’ garage; and Dan, an immature ladies’ man who catches Nikki’s eye. Grown-ups are inscrutable or unhelpful, from Ms. Lavoi, the English teacher who encourages Nikki to read Plath, to Nikki’s mom, who works too late and is away too often to help her youngest daughter heal. In her nostalgic and gritty debut, Darling mashes up autofiction and slam poetry to explore the borderland between teenagers and adults, between family and heritage. Nikki is, after all, “not just...half-Mexican, but the wrong kind of Mexican.” Not everything Darling experiments with here works. At times, the poetic vignettes feel out of place, disconnected from both the narrative and the narrative voice. And when we finally learn the root of Nikki’s depression, it’s hard to understand why a simple plot point would have been kept from us for so long. Even so, Darling’s story is poignant, and she conjures 1990s Los Angeles in all its grim and shimmering glory.
Part punk zine, part battle cry, this debut wields teen angst and riot grrrl rage like a spiked dog collar or a fist.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936932-41-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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