



Anatomy of a Girl Gang
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)
Longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award
A sharp and gritty novel told in multiple voices, Anatomy of a Girl Gang is the powerful story of a gang of teenage girls in Vancouver called the Black Roses, a.k.a. "the city’s worst nightmare": Mac, the self-appointed leader and mastermind; Mercy, the Punjabi princess with a skill for theft; Kayos, a high-school dropout who gave birth to a daughter at age thirteen; Sly Girl, who fled her First Nations reserve for a better life, only to find depravity and addiction; and Z, a sixteen-year-old graffiti artist.
Cast out by mainstream society, the Black Roses rob ATMs, cook crack on stoves, and savagely beat down anyone who dares to harm them. Brutal and broken, they claw at the knot of darkness and violence that tightens around their lives.
Told in stark, vivid, and fearless prose, Anatomy of a Girl Gang is an unflinching story about lost girls struggling for power, voice, and hope.
Ashley Little is author of Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist and the YA novel The New Normal. She lives in British Columbia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Vancouver's rough Downtown Eastside, a group of underprivileged teenage girls seek security and protection. Little (The New Normal) alternates among their voices as well as that of the city itself in potent, vignette-like chapters, some of which are as short as a single sentence. Having quit the Vipers after realizing the gang "didn't give a solid fuck about us," intense 17-year-old Mac starts the Black Roses, an all-female gang of "bad bitches." She recruits Mercy, an orphan and dropout; Kayos, a sexual abuse victim whose anger smolders just below the surface; Sly Girl, an ex-addict from "the rez" with scars from being shot in the face; and Z, a Chinese graffiti artist. They sign on to share a home, steal, deal drugs, and abide by a shared code of conduct in hopes of keeping their pasts at bay and building a future. A romance between Mac and Z, a shooting, a fatal accident, and a robbery fuel jealousy and complicate their plans. While the demise of their operation is perhaps inevitable, the girls' journey is deeply felt and often shocking in its brutality. Ages 14 up. Going OverBeth KephartChronicle, (264p) Kephart (Small Damages) crafts an absorbing story of young love and conflicting ideologies set in 1983 Berlin. Ada, 15, lives an impoverished life in West Berlin with her mother and grandmother, while 18-year-old Stefan who Ada has loved for years lives with his grandmother in dull Friedrichshain on the other side of the wall. The plot shifts between Ada's life, which includes "graffing" scenes of heroic escapes on the Wall itself and visiting Stefan when she can, and Stefan's dissatisfied days spent working as a plumber's apprentice while developing tentative plans to attempt to overcome the wall, despite the potentially fatal consequences. Kephart alternates between the two teenagers' voices, with Stefan's voice written in second-person; deeply held desires for freedom and escape, both physical and artistic, radiate from each narrative. A subplot involving a Turkish boy in need of help gives the novel additional depth, and the sharpness of the lovers' separation is as deeply felt as the worry that they will never reunite. Ages 14 up.