Amusing. Probably should've been edited down to a novella. One nitpicky point: Nell Zink has the narrator, who should know better, describe driving on "the PCH" in Southern California. No SoCal local, as is the narrator, refers to Pacific Coast Highway as "the PCH" -- just PCH. I even bother to mention this because the author is hyper-attuned to language, such as when her characters mock an immigrant coffee shop owner for overusing the word "any." Any, cool. ( )

Oh man.
Spoilers Abound, totally.
I think this book is awful. I just read several positive/glowing reviews and I'm stunned. Plus the author is old. I thought maybe she was very young but no.
It made me feel old because I thought the intellectual content was what teenagers are thinking/reading in modern days. Steiner and Milton Erickson. But now I don't know if anybody reads them except the main character in this novel.
The main character is somehow well-educated, even though she works full time as she goes to high school. Maybe she picks it all up from her handful of rich & well-educated friends.
There isn't much human feeling. The young people are stupid in their "well-educated" way. The boy from Maine -- where in Maine. Whose Maine?
I don't know what to write.

I tried to like this book, but it proved beyond me. It offers an unusual twist on the coming-of-age novel, following the story of Bran (short for Brandy) and her life in California not far from Los Angeles. She has a difficult start in life, and shows great resilience. Her father departed from her life early on, leaving her and her mother and ending up in Australia. As she reached her teens her mother also moved on, joining a Buddhist community in the desert, and leaving her daughter behind in a sort of biker commune.

There were some great images and metaphors, but I felt that there was just not enough substance from which to build a novel, even one as fairly short as this. ( )

Weird, as all her books are. I like ‘em, this one as much as any of them, I think. ( )