Girl Walking Backwards
A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In Girl Walking Backwards, Skye wants what all teenagers want--to survive high school. She lives in Southern California, though, which is making that difficult. Her mother has fallen victim to the pseudo-New Age culture and insists on dragging her to consciousness-raising workshops and hypnotists. As if this weren't difficult enough, Skye falls in love with Jessica, a troubled gothic punk girl who cuts herself regularly with sharp objects. When she finds her boyfriend having sex with Jessica in a bathroom stall at a rave, her romantic illusions collapse and she has to face the fact that she's been running away from her mother's insanity. Right when things look their worst though, Skye is helped by Mol, a pagan who becomes her true friend, and Lorri, a graceful volleyball player with whom she finds real love. From them she learns how to feel authentic emotions in a culture of poseurs and New Age charlatans. In this anti-coming-of-age novel by Bett Williams, where growing up is irrelevant, this is the best gift of all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams confronts coming-of-age angst in this dry, often angry debut about a 16-year-old lesbian who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., with her skittish mother, a spaced-out New Age divorcee on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Despite her parents' rocky breakup, Skye's world has managed to hang together, if precariously. She volunteers to work for Planned Parenthood because "it was the only organization that really dealt with teenagers' right to privacy." Soon she becomes infatuated with Jessica, a sullen, dark-haired girl she meets in a neighborhood cyber-cafe. The one thing Skye's mother is not receptive to is her daughter's lesbianism, and clashes are inevitable when Jessica introduces Skye to a world of raves, drugs and casual sexual encounters. When Jessica has a breakdown of her own, Skye realizes that avoiding reality has its price and begins to come to terms with the key actors in her life: her mother, who wants to "heal" her but ends up in the hospital herself; her well-intentioned but absent father, who is an independent filmmaker in L.A.; her "boyfriend" Riley; Jessica's friend Mol, an exuberant, self-titled Pagan; and Lorri, a volleyball teammate who turns out to be more than just another straitlaced jock. Williams writes in clipped, unemotional prose, underscoring the theme that innocence is hard to find but that naivete is rampant (especially among adults). Somehow in this chaotic and self-indulgent California terrain, her wounded young protagonist emerges as the most reasonable voice of all.
