Angela Sloan
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In his latest novel, universally acclaimed author James Whorton, Jr., delivers a curious Nixon-era caper of broken men and stoic runaways who learn just how much there is to gain, and lose, when you go undercover. Angela Sloan, a seemingly average teenager living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., is left to lie low and fend for herself when her father, a retired CIA officer, skips town in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
Driving a Plymouth Scamp she has just learned to operate, Angela encounters strangers literally at every turn. A fugitive Chinese waitress won’t get out of the car. A jaded lady spy offers up free therapy and roadside assistance. A restless pair of hippies keeps preaching about the evils of monogamy. And an anteater lurks in the unlikeliest of places. But through all of her outlandish adventures, Angela keeps focused on one urgent wish: to reunite with her father.
Bold and quirky, Angela Sloan is a priceless coming-of-age story about stealing diner food and salvaging lost identities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his third novel, Whorton (Frankland) has a fantastic narrator in the teenage Angela Sloan, so named by Ray, the undercover CIA agent who rescued her from the Congo in 1964 when her family was murdered. Back in the U.S., Ray and Angela live together in D.C. as father and daughter; Angela enters the ninth grade and Ray, now retired, falls into a drunken oblivion. But a former agent called Horsefly invites Ray to join his domestic surveillance outfit, and Ray soon finds himself entangled in Watergate. He flees to Baltimore with Angela, posing as a paranoid schizophrenic shut-in. His cover becomes a kind of truth when he sus-pects the building's desk clerk of being a Bureau informant and flees once more, this time leaving Angela behind with his Plymouth Scamp and the code word "Idaho" the only clue as to his whereabouts. Whor-ton gives Angela a distinct voice simultaneously girlish and wise, and very funny. As the girl, at only 14, pushes her Scamp westward, a Chinese waitress stowed in the back, what unfolds is both a coming-of-age road trip through the freakish underbelly of 1970s America, and an affecting examination of identity.
