Guru Cigarettes

Nineteen-year-old Norma wants something exciting to happen this summer. When she accidentally stumbles across an unusual kind of cigarette and a group of fashion pornographers who smoke them, she finds something to shake up her life. Intrigued by their lifestyle, Norma joins them in a heist of the Fountain of Youth, embarks on a trip to London, and experiments with fashion as art. Funny, clever, philosophical, and imaginative, Guru Cigarettes is the story of a young woman caught at a crossroads in her life, weighing the balance between simplicity and clutter and trying to figure out the age-old question, “What is the meaning of life?"

Guru Cigarettes finds Patricia Geary at her most deft, tart, and beguiling. As always in Geary's tales, the real and the fantastic waft together until like tobacco smoke and incense, you can’t see the difference. Yet their distinctive fragrances linger. Geary’s fashion pilgrims explore the weave of art and artifice, pose and posturing, couture and crap, and, most pleasurably, the transcendent power of serious shopping. Buddha's Eight-Fold Path sticks its foot in as well. As one character says of another’s new look, 'Very nouveau ashram.' Indeed!