Fiction, Fiction Subjects, Science Fiction & Fantasy
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Overview
With his vivid, stylized prose, cyberpunk intensity, and seemingly limitless imagination, Jack Womack has been compared to both William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut. Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Womack's fifth novel, is a thrilling, hysterical, and eerily disturbing piece of work.Lola Hart is an ordinary twelve-year-old girl. She comes from a comfortable family, attends an exclusive private school, loves her friends Lori and Katherine, teases her sister Boob. But in the increasingly troubled city where she lives (a near-future Manhattan) she is a dying breed. Riots, fire, TB outbreaks, roaming gangs, and civil unrest threaten her way of life, as well as the very fabric of New York City. In her diary, Lola chronicles the changes she and her family make as they attempt to adjust to a city, and a country, that is spinning out of control.
Her mother is a teacher, but no one is hiring. Her father is a writer, but no one is buying his scripts. Hounded by creditors and forced to vacate their apartment and move to Harlem, her family, and her life, begins to dissolve. Increasingly estranged from her privileged school friends, Lola soon makes new ones: Iz, Jude, and Weezie—wise veterans of the street
Jack Womack's fifth novel centers on Lola Hart, a girl whose family falls on hard times and moves to near-future Harlem. There, surrounded by the new language and violence of the streets, Lola's metamorphosis begins. "Womack astounds and entertains."--Publishers Weekly.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
A sort of prequel to his previous novels (Ambient, Elvissey, etc.), Womack's latest may be his best, a dark and riveting look at where our disintegrating, crime-ridden society may be headed. The only difference between Womack's near-future New York City and our own is that everything is just that much worse. Police and the National Guard patrol the poorer areas as though they were occupied territories; riot fires burn continuously in Queens and Brooklyn; jobs are as scarce as affordable homes and the streets are perilous. Womack displays this bleak world through the diary of 12-year-old Lola Hart, a student at a private girls' school whose financially strapped family moves to Manhattan's poor and troubled Upper West Side, on the edge of Harlem. There two new friends, Iz and Jude, teach her how to steal and instruct her in the ways of the mean streets. As bad turns to worse for her family, despair twists Lola into a vengeful killer. With a street-slick future-speak worthy of A Clockwork Orange and an unflinching eye for the degeneration of our cities, Womack portrays a relentlessly convincing tomorrow that will leave no reader unmoved. (Sept.)Library Journal
New York City in the near future: open warfare rages in Brooklyn, smoke from an unspecified toxic disaster fills the sky above Long Island, troops patrol Harlem streets, tuberculosis is rampant, inflation is zooming, and youth gangs rampage through the streets. Nationally, the situation is even worse; presidents are murdered within months of taking office, and riots are wrecking most of the major cities. This is the world of Lola Hart as recorded in a diary she receives on her 12th birthday. The mutating language of her diary reflects her own metamorphosis from prissy private school girl to murdering gangsta poised to disappear into the netherworld of New York's deadliest gang. P.K. Dick Award-winning novelist Womack's Elvissey, Tor Bks., 1992 apocalyptic vision crackles with intensity, made more memorable by its controlling voice, as original as Alex's in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange or Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.-Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.Carl Hays
In previous novels, including the Philip K. Dick award-winning Elvissey , Womack has shown himself a master of invented idiom and stylish, Joycean wordplay. Now in perhaps the most brilliant display of his linguistic talents, he steps into the mind of an adolescent girl of future Manhattan through the medium of her intensely personal daily diary. Lola Hart begins her record on the eve of her twelfth birthday. She chronicles a comfortable life with family in a Park Avenue apartment, and with friends at a nearby private school. Amid surrounding urban and national climates of escalating violence and social decay, Lola watches and worries as both parents lose their jobs, her little sister becomes catatonic, and her friends alienated. Forced to move into seedy Harlem-area lodgings, Lola soon adopts the language and values of a local street gang. Womack's uncompromising prose creates a starkly realistic portrait of one teenager's all-too-common seduction into gang life. Less science fiction than a sobering forecast based on current, violent trends.Book Details
Published
December 1, 2007
Publisher
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Pages
256
ISBN
9781555847616