The best thing about this first entry in a paranormal fiction series is that the sympathetic characters are evil. The succubus, imp, vampires and demons have one angel in their posse, but the titular character doesn't think much of him. The others like the angel okay, but mostly because he's a drinking buddy.
Lou and her Soul Brothers hit the road in this sequel to one of my favorite books. They are Black teen singers who are exploited by their manager, amass gambling debts, struggle with drugs, have romantic entanglements, and suffer car trouble.
I'm not going to tell you what this novel is about because if I'd known before I read it, I wouldn't have done so. I grabbed the bookjacketless novel off the shelf at Barnard because I loved the author's previous novel.
If that crappy writer had been in American Lit, then Ms. Doman would have written in the margin, "Don't use the passive voice unless there's a compelling reason." I mean, "being pursued"? By whom? I had assumed that such charges would have been pursued by me, and that they still could be. But the paper was acting like I'm not even real, just grammatically implied.
In Roth's future dystopia, people are divided into five factions, based on shared aversions to particular evils (selfishness, cowardice, lies, divisiveness, and ignorance). They get to decide at age 16, whether they want to stick with the faction their parents chose or try their luck with a new one. If it were me, I'd pick Erudite, the faction that thinks that ignorance is the world's greatest problem, but it turns out that in Roth's vision, the Erudite are fascistic.
A 14-year-old Edward R. Murrow enthusiast takes on a private school secret society. Iris is a sad person, as are the other two narrators, but reading the book doesn't make you feel totally blue the way some stories about depressed people do.
I mentioned in my review of Delirium, the first book in Oliver's dystopian trilogy, that I was already halfway through Pandemonium when I was writing that review. I didn't mention that in order to procure Pandemonium, I left work about 90 minutes earlier than usual (since the closest branch of NYPL that had it was closing at 7). In other words, I was hooked.
As I write this, I'm halfway finished with the second book in the trilogy that begins with Delirium. My sister was right that Delirium is way better than Oliver's first book, Before I Fall.
First of all, thank you St. Paul Public Library for owning this small-press, originally self-published mystery and sharing it with me via Interlibrary Loan.
The protagonist is the ultimate anti-heroine, a fat, middle-aged Black lady. She's smart, capable, self-deprecating but not too, and has the obligatory detective novel quirky pet, a green cat named Seamus.
One of the greatest things about this punk rock lesbian bildungsroman is that it takes place on Staten Island, and also the East Village of the 1980s (?). The narrator Nina Boyd is a working class high school junior who is an athlete and aspiring member of the armed forces, in addition to being a dedicated reader of Love and Rockets and a Rocky Horror Picture Show-goer whose mecca is CBGB. Too bad she doesn't make it into CBs in high school due to curfews strictly enforced by her parents.
Our heroine is an alcoholic lesbian virgin who moves to San Francisco to be with her Philosophy of Nonviolence professor and the professor's two lovers, also Nonviolence alumni. 19-year-old Francesca is a cutter, who also has crushes on her sponsor, another waitress, and a soap opera character. All the relationships are incestuous and manipulative--just so you know what you're getting into with this novel.
"Guess what," I told Andy, "I just quit my job."
"Did you make a real big scene when you quit?" he asked wide-eyed.
"I wish."
I think a serious, "How am I living up to my anarchist potential?" assessment is necessary when I quit a job in the future."