Juliet is a typical teenage girl - a little beast. Shrewd and frank and real, this novel follows her efforts to survive herself, as she tries to make sense of her on-and-off relationship with recovery, while traipsing through mid-90's, Southern California. Juliet knows she should be poised for success. She knows her honors English teacher shouldn't be pity changing her grades from F's to C's, knows she shouldn't be snorting coke and chain-smoking at the Palms, knows she shouldn't be hallucinating shadowy, Joan-of-Arc-like messages from God. But there is something dark and violent inside of her fourteen-year-old heart that makes it impossible for her to stop self-destructing. The two forced hospitalisations didn't help her, neither did the outpatient facility for gay, depressed art kids - maybe Redwood Trails therapeutic boarding school will? Through her Didion-esque lens, Escoria captures the brutality of girlhood - its fleeting, toxic friendships, the monstrous ways anger transforms, and the constant feeling of being close to normal, but not normal at all.
