Bouzi - Softcover

Robin, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887391753 ISBN 13: 9780887391750

Publisher: Creative Arts Book Co, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Robin, Jennifer

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

The heady 21-year-old narrator who gives her nickname to this effusive first novel sounds like she's in love with the modern world, and more in love with her sometime boyfriend, the full-time bohemian slacker Jesse Costco. Bouzi retraces her "mad dreams," her infatuation with Jesse and their perilous antics across the streets, playgrounds and ratty apartments of a nameless small American city (which resembles Portland, Ore., where the author makes her home). Bouzi meets Jesse; they fall for each other; they spend charmed days together. Days become weeksAthen it ends. The love story exhibits all the momentum a reader could wish (though its final events could have used some editing). But the experiences of Bouzi, Jesse and friends serve mostly as a frame for Robin's fanzine-like and rhapsodic prose. Trying hard to sound hip and poetic, and often succeeding, Robin combines Gen-X verisimilitude with a slangy, near-hallucinatory, sentence-by-sentence idiosyncrasy. Her writing can be amateurish, but more often it's offbeat and quite vivid. The best of Robin's enraptured paragraphs render this short narrative distant kin to the work of Elizabeth Smart, or to Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which Jesse and Bouzi invoke. Like those authors, and despite rough patches, Robin combines real literary power with appeal to teen readers, who may see beyond the well-placed props of a generationAthe secondhand skates, the junk food, the clothes in pilesAand thoroughly enjoy this odd debut. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Bouzi, the black-acetate-and-Lycra-clad narrator of this novella, doesn't ask for much--just love in the form of a poet-performance artist named Jesse Costco. But once she has him, life is not necessarily lived happily ever after. In 29,778 words, Robin manages to create the quintessential Gen X relationship from beginning to end, in a rich jungle of language. She intersperses verse in the text; still, the writing is so rhythmic and beautiful that the poems do not break up the story. Robin never quite reveals why her character should be liked or believed in the first place. But the language may impress readers so much that at the end they will forget that Bouzi's character is not fully developed. This is a story that should be read aloud to be appreciated. Ellie Barta-Moran

About this edition

• Publisher: Creative Arts Book Co
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0887391753
• ISBN 13: 9780887391750
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 110