Read: Hick by Andrea Portes, 2007, 9781932961324.
After finishing this the other night I was looking up author information and saw a blurb that LJ or SLJ recommended this as a top book for high schoolers. What?! This is one of the best titles around? It was okay and some aspects were quite good but the story just petered out in the end.
Thirteen year old Luli lives outside Lincoln, NE and has two drunks for parents. After the bartender at her parents' favorite hangout swaps spit with her when giving her a ride home Luli figures that her looks and body can get her what she wants. When her father ups and leaves and her mom takes up with a guy who looks "like a peeled worm" Luli grabs her mom's hidden cash and hits the road.
Her first night our Luli gets kicked out of a truck by a creepy driver, Eddie. Asleep in a ditch she wakes in the dark to Glenda taking a piss next to her. She hitches a ride with Glenda, pulls a crime crime with her, and sees Glenda as role model.
Luli ends up getting tricked by the same creepy driver as before, who - wow! what a coincidence - has a bad history with Glenda. Eddie kidnaps Luli, ties her up in a cabin and over several days alternately rapes her and says sweet nothings.
Portes does a very good job showing a lonely and abandoned 13 year old girl's thinking and rationale. Luli is an interesting character and the home scenes and worries over family were well done. Everything else is second rate. Glenda (the Good Witch of the Road) as the drunken and experienced con-woman and seducer. A road trip to self-discovery. Multiple coincidental meetings. Glenda and Eddie killing one another with the same gun in the same stupid, stupid, stupid scene you see in every fucking crappy tv show and b-movie. Luli going to California to stay with the hippie chick mom of the guy her rescues her from the cabin where she was imprisoned.
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1 comment:
Sounds like someone didn't get it. We read this book in my lit class and it was the motherf*cking bomb. This was the only book every single one of us read, even the stoners. I am crazy about this book and can't wait for the movie. Maybe you are just too old.
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