Review by Booklist Review
Set in Tampa, Florida, this startling, superbly written debut novel begins when a 14-year-old boy, David, runs away from home. On the road he meets an odd older couple with whom he smokes crack. After returning home, David becomes a huge concern to his family, and drifts away from their support as he begins to take every drug in sight. Intriguingly, while high, he also consumes Hemingway, Milton, Melville, and other literary giants. Wonderfully evocative of the seedy underbelly of Florida's Gulf Coast, Sanchez' s tale follows David as he cycles through recovery, relapses, homelessness, and rehab, yielding a stunningly written depiction of rock bottom. The prose flows like the water that surrounds the coast, occasionally crashing over the reader with arresting descriptions of drug-induced paranoia. Such passages hark back to Burroughs, while the way David's love of literature helps his sobriety is deeply moving. Even when describing horrors, Sanchez's rich, stylish prose is a treat to read. This is a brilliant, harrowing, and unflinching depiction of a journey to the brink and back.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sanchez's shimmering debut uses rapid-fire prose and dark humor to sketch the hardscrabble coming-of-age of a boy on the Florida Gulf Coast. The troubled David tells of Xanax blackouts in high school classrooms, shooting up oxycodone and meth at home, running away at 14 to pursue a girl, and a series of stints in the Palm Beach County jail, before and after he turns 18. Flush with "energy, rage, and terrible longing," David burns through a series of behavioral therapists and rehab facilities and trades sex for meth. The school wrestling team becomes a temporary distraction before a full-on return to drug stupors and near-lethal blackouts. The frenetic scenes are saturated with panic, stress, and simmering desperation, and the narration can be overly gloomy; its saving grace arrives when David, already a casual reader of Descartes, takes a community college literature course, and new possibilities open up for him. Sanchez is a daring, clever writer: a passage on the particulars of smoking crack is as vivid as David's sober awakening and his yearning to make amends with family. This gritty and engrossing account of a man traversing into and out of hopelessness will stay with readers. Agent: Dan Kirschen, ICM Partners. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this coming-of-age age tale from Sanchez, winner of Michener and PEN America Writing for Justice fellowships, 14-year-old David runs away from his Florida Gulf Coast home in pursuit of a girl and ends up trying crack cocaine. He is instantly under its sway, his life ripped apart for a decade, but then encountering Dante, Melville, and Hemingway in a literature class at a community college changes everything.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young man in Florida battles drug addiction in this striking first novel. "Everything happened fast for years," says the narrator of Sanchez's debut novel, and it's a remarkable understatement. The book starts off with the narrator, 14 years old at the time, traveling via bus from Tampa to Key West, hoping to spend time with a girl he has a crush on. He immediately encounters an older man who plies him with drugs and, along with a woman, molests him. Things don't get much better for the narrator, who over the next several years struggles with drug addiction, spending "a couple months on the street, a couple months in jail, a couple in the psych or the halfway and back on the street again. This job, that job, always only for a couple months or weeks before something happened. Sober for a few months and then not." He hits rock bottom so often the term loses its meaning, though eventually he gets help after experiencing a seizure, moving into a halfway house, enrolling in community college, and trying to reconcile with his estranged parents. Sanchez's novel has the structure and tenor of an addiction memoir, though his narrator would hate to hear that ("Memoirs are whiny," he sneers), particularly at the beginning; it takes the author a little time to find his rhythm. But once he does, he's unstoppable, writing with an undeniable power that only occasionally gets away from him. (There are a few lines--"Everything was time soup in my head. Dumplings of memories and noodley thoughts"-- that don't quite land.) Still, the narrator is a memorable creation, vulnerable and self-aware, and Sanchez does a mostly excellent job describing the monstrous effects of drug addiction in a way that's harrowing but never exploitative. Despite a few intermittent stumbles, it's a compelling book. A captivating debut. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
