Girl Detective

I forgot to mark my blog-a-versary this year.

In June is was twelve (12!) years since I started writing at Blogspot with Girl Detective, continued with Mama Duck, then merged and came here.

G. Grod and I toss around ideas about making a new site under my real name, of which the Girl Detective blog would be a part, but so far, I’m still here blogging about mostly books, with movies, motherhood, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Glad you’re still along for the ride.

Any thoughts, encouragement, discouragement, on the new-blog/real-name idea would be most welcome.

This is an excerpt from a piece of fiction I’m working on. The Replacements are playing Midway Stadium in St. Paul this Saturday, and everyone around here is blah, blah, blah, Replacements, so I’m risking posting something I’m not sure is good or not because the timing feels right.

Name That Tune

I think I’ve had sex to this song, Nicole thought, then turned up the volume in the car. It was an old memory, she thought, at least fifteen years ago. Who had it been?

Mary Lucia’s voice followed. She never talked over a song, beginning or end, one of the reasons Nicole liked listening to her. “That was ‘I Will Dare,’ local music from the Replacements, off the album Let It Be from 1987.”

The details emerged from the haze of memory. Not fifteen years–more like twenty. It was Julian, saying the Replacements were a great band to have sex to.

He used to say those kind of things when they’d go out drinking after work. Then, she thought it was because they were buddies, and she hoped he was flirting. He asked what music she liked, then mocked her answers as songs about sex, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ and INXS’ ‘The One Thing,’ rather than songs that were good to have sex to.

Nicole wilted as his criticism. She’d never heard of the Replacements. They must be on WHFS, the station Julian and his friends listened to, not the classic rock she favored at the time.

Then she rallied, and stood her ground. It wasn’t because the songs were about sex, she said, but that they had strong base lines. She liked music with a back beat.

Julian admitted, somewhat grudgingly, that the Replacements had a good bass line, too. He continued to bring up sex, like how he always slept with girls at their places, so he could be the one to leave. He asked her if she knew what ‘coyote ugly’ meant.

Of course she knew. She’d been friends with guys for years, and knew some of their secrets.

It took a long time to realize Julian was neither being her friend nor flirting with her. He was taunting her. He knew she liked him, knew she wanted to sleep with him. So he went out drinking with her and talked about sex until she felt ready to rip off her clothes. She probably knew Julian wasn’t to be trusted, though, because she never did. Rip off her clothes, that is.

Until that one night. When she finally heard the Replacements.

So, I made a pie

For an article I was writing elsewhere, I called my mom for the directions to cranberry ice cream pie, a staple of our holiday table when I was growing up. In a strange turn of events, this is a not a recipe posted in a zillion other places. In my usual fashion, I tinkered with it. And that’s what I am posting here.

Easy-Peasy Cranberry Ice Cream Pie
serves 1 to 8

Ingredients:

Pre-made 9-inch graham-cracker crust (a homemade gingersnap crust* is delightful, but not easy-peasy)
1 15-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon vanilla (I increased to 1 teaspoon.)
8 ounces cream cheese, softened and cut into 1” cubes
16-ounce can jellied cranberry sauce (can make whole berry cranberry sauce** but I haven’t tested, so can’t guarantee results.)
Optional: Whipped heavy cream for garnish

In food processor or blender, thoroughly combine condensed milk, lemon juice, vanilla and cream cheese. Fold or pulse in cranberry sauce. Pour into crust. Freeze till firm. To serve, let soften for ten minutes at room temperature. Garnish with whipped cream, or not.

*Quick-ish homemade crumb crust: in food processor whiz 6 ounces gingersnaps or graham crackers. Pulse in 2 tablespoons melted unsalted butter. Press crumbs into 9-inch pie plate. Bake at 350F for 10 minutes. Cool pan to room temperature on wire rack, then fill.

**Quickish homemade cranberry sauce: Combine 2/3 cup water with 2/3 cup sugar, bring to boil in medium saucepan till sugar dissolves. Add 8-ounce frozen cranberries, return to boil, lower heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Let cool to room temperature.

You guys all know what a TBR pile is, right, since you’re my people? It’s To-Be-Read pile. Or, in our case, piles.

The other night my husband G. Grod says that Steve Brust linked to a site that has maps of all the Aubrey/Maturin voyages. “ALL OF THEM!”

He was really excited.

For the not-as-nerdy readers, this means the fictional voyages of Aubrey and Maturin in Patrick O’Brian’s series.

When he noticed I was not excited, he said snidely, or perhaps mock-snidely (sometimes it’s hard to tell) “Oh, yeah, you haven’t read them.”

See, they’re part of this ongoing squabble about how he recommends books then I don’t read them. And when I eventually do, then I gush about how great they are, e.g., Cloud Atlas.

In response, I simply gestured to my TBR pile on my bedside table.

G started to laugh. Then, I pointed to his TBR “pile,” which is the top of our radiator.

And, for fun, here’s a detail. Notice the cobwebs and thick layer of dust?

And finally, because I’m letting it all hang out, here, I’ll admit the bedside table is only my most recent TBR. I had to take all the others and create a wall of books because we’re balking at buying new bookshelves.

In my defense, the wall has become a sort of book catchall, accumulating things that aren’t To-Be-Read. Also, there are a few more stashes here and there throughout the house of things to-be-read.

Yes, we have a severe book-buying problem.

I first saw Jason Padgett’s Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel reviewed in Entertainment Weekly. The premise fascinated me. In his twenties, Padgett was a muscle-built party boy. One night he got beat up outside a bar, and after that is a different person, interested in math, and able to see mathematical patterns in everyday sights like water in the sink, or dew on leaves. As he fought to manage the post-traumatic stress disorder and emotional repercussions from his brain injury, he comes to embrace his new love of and interest in math, and goes on to have a very different life than anyone expected and becomes the first documented case of acquired savant syndrome with mathematical synesthesia

Padgett narrated the book to the co-author, Maureen Ann Seaberg. It felt sometimes as if the book needed a tighter editor for some of Padgett’s anecdotes. But the story was so compelling to me, as was the insight into brain and cognitive science, that these far outweighed my quibbles with style.

Kristi is a friend of mine, and one of my writing buddies, so I am predisposed to like her books. Blessed are the Meek is the second in her Gabriella Giovanni series, which began with Blessed are the Dead.

Gabriella is a newspaper reporter in San Francisco from a big Italian Catholic family. She’s got an Irish Catholic cop boyfriend, so things seem to be looking up from the challenging ending of Blessed are the Dead until the boyfriend’s ex turns up. Then a lot of other people start turning up dead.

In Blessed are the Dead, we knew who the bad guy was, but didn’t know how things would play out. In this sequel, we don’t know who is causing the trouble, or why, so there’s a strong “what happens next” factor that kept me turning pages to the end.

I enjoy spending time with Gabriella. She’s kind of a mess, but tries to keep it together at work and with her family. There’s also a lot of well-described food in the books, and I love a good book with good food. If you’re a mystery fan, this is a compelling page turner.

I followed up my recent re-reading of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis with two of her other memoirs about her family, Embroideries, and Chicken with Plums.

Embroideries expands on the life of Marjane’s grandmother, and stories are told by her and her friends in regular women’s gathering for tea. The stories are about marriage, sex, love, and its lack. The intimate setting of a small living room contrasts with the oppressive regime outside in Iran, and makes this small book a real gem.

Chicken with Plums is the story of one of Satrapi’s great-uncles, a musician in an unhappy marriage. In flashbacks, we learn his history in music and love. This is the second time I read the book, and both times it failed to connect with me emotionally as Satrapi’s other books did. Neither the story nor images remain with me, as they do from the other books.

After I finished re-reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I felt ambivalent, meaning torn, not indifferent. My favorite part of the book was the Hempstock family. A friend told me that the Hempstocks appeared in two other Gaiman works, Stardust and The Graveyard Book. I took my lovely edition of the graphic novel off a dusty shelf and dove in, probably for the first time since I read it in the individual issues when they came out in 19xx, and subsequently earned a World Fantasy Award. After that, Gaiman made a prose novel out of it, and after that it was turned into a movie. But before all that, it was a four-issue comic-book series, and that is what I re-read.

The tale starts with a young man named Dunstan Thorn, but soon shifts to the future and Dunstan’s son Tristan, who makes a rash promise to a pretty girl. An adventure in the land of Faerie begins, which includes murder, mayhem, witches, unicorns, falling stars, prophecies, a weird small farting creature, truth, and lies.

Gaiman and Vess have obvious affection for a good fairy story. Gaiman’s market is straight out of Christina Rosetti’s poem The Goblin Market, and Vess’s illustrations hark back to Arthur Rackham’s classic fairy drawings. While Tristan’s tale is fun and interesting, the only Hempstocks that appear are dull and conventional, nothing like their sparkling sistren in The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

This is an entertaining diversion, made better by its illustrations. Thus, I can’t see the value in seeking out the prose novel, but I remember the movie was pretty good.

Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home by Nina Stibbe is yet another recommendation from my husband via Caitlin Moran, whom he follows on Twitter (@caitlinmoran). He kept laughing aloud as he read Love, Nina, which was recommendation enough in itself. Then he thoroughly qualified it, saying I should only read it if I wanted to, it was good, but not Cloud Atlas or anything.

Love, Nina is a series of letters written by the author to her sister in Leicestershire. At twenty, Nina moved to London to be nanny for two clever, opinionated boys. They’re sons of a famous film director and the director of the London Review of Books. Nina’s letters feature walk-ons from some of London’s creative intelligentsia, observed through Nina’s her critical eye.

Nothing much happens, and I can see why some readers might be bored with it, but I found Nina’s letters and details of ordinary family life in a creative family both charming and fascinating.

Everyone keeps saying how great yoga is and that we should all go and learn to relax and let go of things that are thwarting us in life (i.e. turkey mince) and breathe properly and stretch and so on…

I’ll think about going (to yoga). But ‘m not sure I want to be that relaxed. I am who I am and I might not do so well as a relaxed person. (86)

It helped that Nina doesn’t gloss over her own shortcomings as a bad cook, a lazy housekeeper, and a teller of fibs to cover her butt, as when she “pranged” the car, or “nicked” a particular towel.

In between the lines we get glimpses of her sister’s life, hilarious as when the neighbor showers outdoors, but also Nina’s own self doubts as she applies to university, begins classes and moves on from being the official nanny and becomes one of the revolving guests at what she calls simply, “55.”

The book reminded me of Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road. I’m an anglophile, a book geek, and I like letters, so this was definitely my cuppa. If you’re looking for a plot, or a kinder narrator who doesn’t curse so much, this might not work for you.

Bridge #9? Who knows?

Realized yesterday that “Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time” could work for me as a blog title, blog subtitle, or epitaph.

Things yesterday that seemed like a good idea at the time:

1. Wearing a skirt to ride my bicycle, hoping to demonstrate the triumph of the ‘penny in yo’ pants‘ hack.

Alas, maybe its my skirt, maybe it’s my generous thighs, but I just cannot get this hack to work for me. putting the coin through both layers, back and front, does not stay, then looks like I’m shitting a coin when it falls out plus then my skirt rides up when I’m biking, and while I wear underwear and am thus not flashing my pink parts at anyone, still, it’s not the image I want to project.

2. Taking a long ride for the first time in a long time. Today, I am saddle sore. Not sure that skirt was a good choice there either, though it is dang cute.

3. Thinking I could depend on my phone’s navigation rather than carefully plotting the route to someplace I’d been to years ago, especially because it advised going over a bridge I’d had trouble finding before, PLUS a bridge in the vicinity of an area of city road washed out earlier this year by a landslide and still closed to traffic. Why yes, I am embracing run-on sentences today.

Getting there: followed phone’s directions. Instead of going way I know pretty well, I was confident I could find elusive Bridge 9. Not so. End up on rocky dirt path, and when Google maps (which still insists, years later, that bike directions are in beta, for good reason, I discover, but still, let’s get it together, already!) tells me to turn left on a bridge, the bridge is over my head, with neither end in sight.

I followed detour signs and ended up on the opposite side of river, and thought, this is wrong (which is was) but just kept going. I did finally arrive at my destination, having to re-cross river, after an hour 25 instead of the predicted 50 minutes, sweaty, late and feeling like an idiot.

Then, on way back, directions said to go straight for 5.4 miles and turn right on elusive Bridge #9. Easy, I thought, and maybe road is not washed out. BUT road is washed out, so took detour, and phone kept telling me to do impossible things like turn left into a building. I followed a nice U student who said he didn’t know which bridge was #9, but that he was going across river, so I followed him, got across river, bonus: stayed across river (yay!) and eventually found my way home.

Later, looked at map to determine I’d probably gone across Washington Avenue bridge, and have yet to get to #9.

So, what did I learn?

1. Wear pants. Possibly padded ones.

2. Bike more, so I am not going on a long ride, woefully out of shape.

3. Take a day in which I have no goal and am not hungry or tired or angry or overheated and figure out where the heck this bridge is. I had a similar problem once finding the Cedar Lake Trail entrance off the River Road (because it’s crappily marked, and almost literally a hole in the wall.)

Problems: 1. costs money. 2 and 3 sound fine, but experience shows more biking = less writing AND more eating and money spending. Solution to 2 is to moderate and alternate, and 3 is to just bike and stop biking to food destinations.

And thus, I sit in my coffee shop, writing. Not biking.

Dear reader Kitty, who lurks, and is perhaps the first fan of my writing:

I keep getting spam from HostGator. Isn’t the the company someone you know works for? While I adore that someone, I do not adore the spam.

If so, can you find a way to get this site off the spam list? Spam makes me feel bad about the blog, which makes me blog less so I get less spam. But I want to blog more!

Any help with this, from any readers, would be greatly appreciated.

Love,

GD aka KB

Holy cats, people, why didn’t anyone tell me how awesome David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was?

Oh, right, everyone did, including my husband. He doesn’t urge books on me often, thus he gets really annoyed when I put him off. Cloud Atlas I put off because it’s over 500 pages and looked dense and intimidating. Imagine my surprise when I tore through it in less than a week, a busy week at that. It’s the kind of book that makes me resent anything and everything that makes me put it down

There are five novellas that stop mid-story on cliffhangers, with a sixth one in the middle before returning in reverse order to the previous five, taking up where each left off. I could begin to detail the many connections and overlaps, but I’d be here all day. I have a whole list of sites to visit to nerdishly obsess over this book once I get various deadlines met. I don’t nerdishly obsess over just any books, you know. If you, like me, have started it before and put it down pick it back up, and keep going. Once you get going, it’s hard to stop.

The novellas are written in different styles, with different but overlapping characters. This book is clever, thoughtful, intelligent, and a great, great read. Which means I’ll want to go back and read everything he’s written, because apparently all his books together overlap, just like this novel.

Oh, this is going to be a fun ride. And Cloud Atlas has earned a spot on our “books we like so much we own multiple copies” shelf. Because we are obsessive nerds.

Seconds is a standalone graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley, author/illustrator of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. Scott Pilgrim was about a twenty-something Canadian slacker boy. Seconds features Katie, a 29-year-old chef on the verge of opening her own restaurant.

Katie has a gorgeous ex named Max, a weird server working for her named Hazel, a money pit of a new restaurant, and a hot affair going with the new chef at Seconds. Katie starts having weird dreams, and after a rough night, she finds something weird in the dresser that came with the house. If she eats a mushroom and writes down something she regrets, she gets a second chance to make it right. Then things get really weird.

Seconds is funny and charming, with manga-influenced art and its Japanese folk mythology.

One of my favorite aspects was when the narrator of the story would argue with Katie, and the words would clash with the pictures. From page 11, which you need to see to get the full effect:

Narrator: Katie was stressed out.
Katie: I’m perfectly fine.
Narrator: She was sleeping too little, worrying too much, feeling old.
Katie: She was in her twenties and young and totally great.
Narrator: At 29, she felt like everything was slipping away.
Katie: Um, no.
Narrator:…and she was talking to herself more than usual.
Katie: [scribbly ball of frustration or cursing]

It’s also a lovely coming-of-age tale about that liminal time of 29 when big, scary things often happen in life, and an entertaining, sometimes scary meditation on the old adage of “Be careful what you wish for.”

See my most recent post on The Ocean at the End of the Lane for my complicated reader “relationship” with Gaiman. I’m not anti-Gaiman. I’m just anti-pedestal-i-zation of Gaiman. And Fortunately the Milk illustrates why.

It’s a charming, lovely little book. Little in size, little in scope and ambition. A family is out of milk, Dad runs to the store, comes back long hours later to tell a tale fantastic. The illustrations by Skottie Young are funny, though they don’t always match the text. And the story the dad tells is also funny. Both my 8 and 11 year-old sons read and enjoyed it, as did I. But we don’t feel moved to add it to our permanent collection. An entertaining diversion. That is all.

E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars is a young-adult mystery novel. Every review of it mentions its twist of an ending (see, and now this one has, too). As I read, there were many times I thought I knew exactly what was coming. I didn’t.

The book is narrated by Cadence Sinclair, a privileged girl who spends her summers on her family’s private island off Martha’s Vineyard.

Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.
No one is a criminal.
No one is an addict.
No one is a failure.
The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive.

The novel moves back and forth in time, but does a good job of grounding the reader in the when. We know immediately that Cadence had an accident, and the rest of the book is both Cadence and the reader piecing together what happened. My theories changed as I went along, and I dreaded being right. But hats off to Lockhart. All my guesses were wrong, and the answer not only surprised me, but held up supported by all that had gone before. My one tiny quibble was the absence of an explanation about the name “Liars” for Cadence and her cousins.

In any case, it’s a heck of an ending, and a thumping good read, with some nice meditations on white privilege to make it more substantial that just a beach read.

I have a complicated reader “relationship” with Neil Gaiman. Gaiman authored Sandman, my gateway title into comic books, where I’ve been romping happily for the last 24 years. Over the last 24 years, his status has a geek icon has grown. While I appreciate some of his later works, I think the comics writing was better, and the praise far outstrips the work its heaped on. I’m not anti-Gaiman, just anti-pedestal-i-zation of Gaiman.

The first time I read The Ocean at the End of the Lane, was soon after I’d read Julian Barnes’ Man Booker prize winnerThe Sense of an Ending. The books share a common theme of a middle-aged man with a bad memory looking back on an encounter with a vibrant female in his youth whom he grievously harmed. Gaiman’s book is full of magic and myth but only serviceable prose. But for two scenes, it could fit with his works for children. Barnes’ is meticulously crafted, with stop-in-your-tracks prose; it is decidedly adult both in theme and craft. Reading the two together made me like Ocean less.

On a second read for one of my book groups, I found The Ocean at the End of the Lane compulsively readable, even though I knew the end. It has a terrific need-to-know-what-happens-next factor. I think people misidentify it a fantasy. I find it contains more elements of horror. In the end, though, it felt like empty calories, spent with one of my least favorite character types, the regretful middle-aged white man. I was glad to leave behind the book and its narrator, though I’d happily spend time with the Hempstock women again, which I tried to do by re-reading Gaiman and Charles Vess’ Stardust graphic novel. It does contain Hempstocks, but not the interesting ones.

I end this entry no less conflicted than when I began.

Draw your own conclusions. And please comment if you’ve read it.

I read Marjane Satrapi’s two comic-book memoirs, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, years ago when they were released in the US. I recently selected them for one of my book groups, as some members had never read a graphic novel or memoir. Not only do I think they are accessible and compelling, but I think they’re great examples of the comics medium, showcasing how deceptively simple black and white art can convey a story with multiple layers and meanings.

Persepolis 1: The Story of a Childhood, is about Marjane’s youth in Iran, where her parents are wealthy intellectuals. She provides history of the country, as well as numerous small but telling details of her life, and her parents lives, under the increasingly repressive religious regime of the Ayatollah after the Shah was deposed.

Satrapi and I are nearly the same age. Some of my first political memories are of the hostages in Iran, and the US media’s portrayal of heroes and villains in the uprising. I only wish I’d had a book like this when I was younger, but it’s better late than never.

Persepolis 2:The Story of a Return, is harder to like, but a more complicated book. In the first book, Marji is a charming child, and a pawn of the history happening around her. In book 2, she grows to adolescence, and adulthood, making flawed and human mistakes while still portraying the evolving political environment and oppression, as well as her and her friends and families small rebellions within it.

The volumes are available separately, or together in a collected version. Additionally, there is an animated film for which Satrapi was a collaborator. It is lovely and evocative, both similar and different to the books, but leveraging motion and sound to tell the story in different ways. If you haven’t read the books, do so, then see the movie.

A friend invited me to a book discussion of Gene Luen Yang’s graphic historical novels Boxers and Saints, so I figured I’d finally seize the synchronicity and pick up Yang’s highly acclaimed, award-winning first graphic novel, American Born Chinese.

The stories of three beings interweave: the ancient Monkey King of China, a boy named Jin Wang moving to a new school in the US, and an American white boy named Danny whose cousin, Chin Kee, visits and embarrasses him on a regular basis.

I enjoyed the exploits of the monkey king and Jin’s story. Less clear to me, and far less enjoyable (though not intended to be) were the episodes with boring Danny and his offensively caricatured cousin Chin Kee, embodying numerous American stereotypes of Asians, and set to a visual laugh track. These sections were discomforting, deliberately confronting racist stereotypes, and felt less balanced than the other two storylines when all three intersected.

I wanted to really like this book, I can see why it’s so highly praised, I question my reasons for merely liking it but in the end, that’s what it was: I liked it.

As I try to catch up on my book blogging, I keep an eye out for opportunities to condense and collapse, two books by an author, or graphic novels. Should I pair a graphic novel with the novel that spurred me to re-read it? Or should I pair it with the other graphic novel I read near it, which was superficially very different, yet perhaps lurkingly the same. As I type this, I’ve gone with the latter, but we’ll see how things end up. I may have to give each of them their own entry.

Let’s just get this out of the way, then, especially for you kind readers who visit from Semicolon’s Review of Books. One of the graphic novels is a collection of the series Sex Criminals: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky. It was recommended by a friend who leads a local book group. I had passed on it because of its title both when I saw the comic coming out monthly and when I saw it collected, but my friend was adamant that it was great, so I gambled the $9.99 (well played, Image Comics marketing) for the collection, and ended up glad I did. While it is definitely weird, and about sex, it isn’t depraved. In fact, it’s often kind of sweet. Really!

Suzie is an average young woman who works in a library about to be bought by a large corporation. There is one weird thing about her, though. When she has an orgasm, time stops, and she can wander around in it while others are frozen. One night at a party, she and a guy named Jon hit it off, and she is startled to learn he has the same ability. Jon is a book-loving geek, and he and Suzie are quickly fascinated and infatuated with one another. With their rising passion, they conceive the idea to rob the bank that’s destroying the library and buy back the books with what they steal. They’re like Robin Hood, with orgasms. Unfortunately, they’re alarmed to find there are some sort of sex police who can also move in stopped time, intent on stopping Suzie and Jon, no matter how well intentioned.

Sex Criminals is one weird trick, indeed. Suzie and Jon are so charming, though, and the questions about who and what the time police are, have me waiting eagerly for the next collection. So eagerly, in fact, that I am now reading it monthly, not waiting for the trade.

OK, well, there you go. Apparently, I think Sex Criminals deserves its own entry.

Every once in a while, my husband urges a book on me. He doesn’t do it often. This might be to his credit, but he admitted recently it’s a comparative scale. He really wants me to read Cloud Atlas so he can re-read it and we can watch the film together. So everything he reads that he wants to recommend, he asks, do I want her to read it more than I want her to read Cloud Atlas? In rare cases, the answer is yes, as with Rat Girl by Kristin Hersh.

If Americans thought music and art belonged together, they wouldn’t have the Grammys.

Rat Girl is Hersh’s memoir of 1985. She was enrolled in college but homeless by choice, and a member of a rising band in the Boston punk scene. She also had increasing mental difficulties tied to a childhood car accident.

She refers to her half sister, Tea, who in real life is her stepsister Tanya Donnelly, who went on to The Breeders and Belly. We also get to meet Betty, Kristin’s classmate at college before she moves to Boston with the band. Betty is older and claims to have a colorful Hollywood past. The reader, like Kristin, wonders throughout if Betty is crazy, a liar, or telling the truth.

Two significant things happen in the last part of the book. Unfortunately, I found them detailed on the book cover, and would much rather have been surprised by them unfolding. So if you read the book, try not to read about it.

With its evocative prose-poetry, detailing of the rising punk scene, and magical realism, the book reminded me strongly of Francesca Lia Block’s Dangerous Angels series of young-adult novels, which began with Weetzie Bat.

I am abashed to say I dragged my feet when my husband suggested it. I didn’t particularly care for the music of Throwing Muses, or Hersh’s voice. So it was interesting to read that Hersh doesn’t think she has a good singing voice, and is surprised by the band’s success. They wrote songs for themselves; that other people liked them too was a bonus.

I enjoyed getting insight into Hersh’s post-trauma brain, and her lovely and disturbing creative process.