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Mark D. Diehl
CreateSpace
May 9, 2011/ ASIN: B005067WJQ
Contemporary Fiction
Amazon
Reviewed
by Beth E. McKenzie
Thanks to the
media, it is a familiar story and its easy to see what happened.
Sara is a crack whore. She sells and degrades her body for drugs
and other things. The difference is that most of us have never watched
the transaction before.
She was a sweet and happy child with an over-achieving heart surgeon
for a father and an insecure, indulgent, jealous mother that takes
care of her own ego through chemical fits connected by alcoholic
binges. Sara starts drinking young, sharing her parent's booze and
pills with her school chums. As Sara becomes more addicted, and
socially phobic, her two best friends try to hold her up (sometimes
literally) through high school but then move off to college to start
their own lives. Sara finds a new kind of friend that helps her
get the drugs she craves. When we catch up with her she has dropped
out of college and is working as a dishwasher where she meets her
cocaine supplier. From there we follow Sara through her nightmare
life, never quite sure if we are part of another hallucination or
if the scene unfolded to all participants equally.
The story is set in the 1980's and news reports about President
Reagan and the Soviets also keep you one step out of time, especially
if you are old enough to remember the events. I still don't know
if the conclusion is a suggested hallucination or finally the end
of Sara's pain.
The author
is very clever in the way he gives us room to not know what is real
with the understanding that it is all real for Sara. The author
also interjects burst of reality like "Mummy" wanting
time with her daughter and memories of Sara's best friends in youth.
I remember thinking at one point, "Did somebody just get killed?"
I was never clear what happened and it added to the surreal, environment
that I never did figure it out.
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