Seven Deadlies
A Cautionary Tale
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Dear Bennington College Admissions Officer:
I’m probably not your average applicant from Beverly Hills, CA. And I’m not one to brag, but I’m pretty much the smartest girl in my class at Mark Frost Academy. My grades are excellent. My motivation is high. I don’t drink or do drugs or hang out with the bad kids. I’m pretty much all business. My life is not going to end here, in this part of Los Angeles.
I’m going places.
Which brings me to my latest venture: babysitting teenagers.
A few of the moms talked to my mother. You should see them. They gather around her like Bieber fans. She’s barely five feet tall, beautiful and regal, a Latina queen.
Their diamond bracelets shimmer. I look at those bracelets and want to eat them.
Where did they go wrong?
Can Perry help out this weekend? I have to go to New York for fashion week. I have to go to a premiere. My daughter needs help with biology . . . and staying out of my medicine cabinet.
I get paid forty an hour. I have business cards.
My name is Perry Gonzales. The stories you are about to read are true. The names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent. By the time you’re finished, I think you’ll appreciate how desperately I need to get out of here.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Levangie (The Starter Wife) takes a slight detour in her darkly funny new novel; she continues to lampoon the wealthy, powerful, and superficial, but her POV this time belongs to a 14-year-old Latina, Perry Gonzales, who has a scholarship to a posh private school and who babysits other students. The book unfolds through a series of essays one for each of the seven deadly sins written by Perry to the admissions committee at Bennington College about the teens and families she encounters. The essays are inventive and clever, and for each sin there is a macabre consequence. In "Wrath," a firstborn son responds to his twin sisters with such destructive anger that Perry is hired to "guard" the girls so their mother may nap. The spoiled girl in "Lust" experiences such longing for the singing Judas Brothers that she stages not only a hunger strike, but also a shopping and breathing strike in an effort to secure a private concert. In "Pride," a father's unrelenting demand for perfection from his son, the school's star athlete, provides the moral. The ending comes with a twist that in some ways takes all the fun out of Perry's essays, but gives voice to her hardworking mother, presented throughout the book as wonderfully wise, wry, and maternal.
