Bad Habits
A Love Story
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Twenty-five-year-old graphic artist Cristy Road embarks on an uncensored and largely autobiographical tour of an underground world, one full of wild characters and personal revolutions. In her circle, drugs are cheap, ubiquitous, and sometimes feel like the only way out, and Road’s street psychopharmacology results in experiences that are both revelatory and tragic. Writing in a tradition of some of the finest transgressive authors, such as Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, and Kathy Acker, Road depicts the damaged soul and psyche of her young protagonist with language as violent as the street and sex as raw as the language. Somewhere along this hyperreal tour, our heroine learns to leave her bad habits behind and emerge stronger and more independent, clean and open to love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Illustrator Road's overwrought debut novel chronicles the life of Carmencita Gutierrez Alonzo, a young bisexual Cuban-American punk rocker living a life of grungy hedonism in New York City, who traffics in head-scratching asides like, "The world as we knew it tried our toxicity, but in our loose pockets we often broke out a malevolent champagne." The plot is sparse; instead, readers are hit with a barrage of vignettes of bar life, parties, drug binges and mostly ill-fated romances. Far better than the text are Road's illustrations, found on nearly every page. Displaying a cinematic eye for composition, Road adorns her novel with memorable illustrations, including a Miami sky full of gun-shaped clouds, and Carmencita and a lover embracing, a tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor visible on his arm. Less happily, the more than a dozen portraits of Carmencita reinforce the text's navel-gazing aspects. Regardless of whether Carmencita is hopelessly shallow or a wounded soul, Road's drawings deserve a better vehicle.
