Rose of No Man's Land
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4.5 • 8 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Fourteen-year-old Trisha Driscoll is a hungry machine, taking in her hometown of Mogsfield, Massachusetts — a place that has shamelessly surrendered to neon signs, theme restaurants, and cookie-cutter chain stores. Cynical but naive, Trisha observes the disappointing world from the ignored perspective of a teenager: creepy guys, the unfathomable sadness of the elderly, illegal tattoos, and the wild kingdom of mall culture. After being hired and abruptly fired from the most popular shop at the absurd and kaleidoscopic Square One Mall, Trisha finds herself linked up with a chain-smoking, physically stunted mall rat named Rose, and her life shifts into manic overdrive. A whirlwind exploration of poverty and dropouts, 'Rose of No Man’s Land' is the world according to Trisha — a furious love story between two weirdo girls, brimming with snarky observations and soulful wonderings on the dazzle-flash emptiness of contemporary culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tea follows up her Lambda Award winning San Francisco prostitution memoir, Valencia (2000), her sporadically transcendent collected poems, The Beautiful (2003), and last year's graphic novel, Rent Girl (now in development for TV), with this inspired queer bildungsroman. In Trisha Driscoll, Tea has developed an unreliable narrator who stands on her own. Trisha is a doughy, alcoholic 10th-grade denizen of Mogsfield, Mass., a fictional white trash nowhere. Her father is long gone; her mother, owing to psychosomatic back problems, does not leave the couch; her mother's boyfriend, Donnie, enters the kitchen only to make ramen; her younger sister, Kristy, is obsessed with launching herself onto reality TV and constantly films the family dysfunctioning around her. The first half of the novel establishes Trisha's grim bedroom-to-mall despair. In the second, a new friend, Rose, a fry cook who looks 12 appears, and the two go on a crystal meth fueled adventure with blissful highs and crashing lows. Tea is brilliant in making the stakes for Trisha abundantly clear as she discovers sex (and, concurrently, her sexuality), drugs and the emotional gains and losses attendant to each. Add in minor characters like the never-seen but oft-discussed Kim Porciatti and various dumb guys in cars, and you have a postmillennial, class-adjusted My So-Called Life.
