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FADE INTO YOU

Name: FADE INTO YOU
Author: Nikki Darling
ISBN: 978-1-936932-41-2

by Nikki Darling ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2018

Part punk zine, part battle cry, this debut wields teen angst and riot grrrl rage like a spiked dog collar or a fist.

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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 She’s a “brooding musical theater gal,” struggling with depression and loneliness behind a screen of tough talk and withdrawn behavior.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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.