I’ll call this one another bit of validation for my habit of never reading the back cover of a book before reading the book itself. Don’t do it kids! Spoilers coming right up, so if you don’t want to know why that’s the case, stop reading this and go stare at another screen for a bit. Read this book though, it’s great! For the rest of you, the back of the book refers to Sophie and some trouble she gets into… and we don’t meet Sophie until we’re 17 pages into a 54 page book. What we do see beforehand are two punks at a show, and they’re the sketchy asshole kind of punks, not the “heart of gold, just trying to have fun” kind of punks. If you’ve never been near that scene, yes, there is a huge difference. Anyway, one of these punks heckles the singer of the band enough that he walks off the stage, they steal his guitar and smash it, and drunkenly drive off into the night. One of them does have a brief mystical experience with some lights in the sky, so it’s not like they’re both thorough monsters, just not that great as far as human beings go. So the drunken driving ends up in a near miss, but they learn no lessons from that, so they keep going until they do crash into another car. And hey, it’s Sophie! She’s a sophomore in college, they help her out of her wrecked car and take her to an all night diner to wait for the car repair shop to open up. Of course they’ll be happy to help her and share insurance information later! But she eventually leaves to use the restroom, is disoriented enough to leave her purse in the booth, and of course they run off with it. From here it’s all the story of Sophie, as she sleeps for a few hours in the booth, calls her mother for help in the morning, and still makes it on time for the event she was trying to make, but that’s enough spoilers for now. I certainly wasn’t expecting it, and it wasn’t the sort of thing she should have been doing with head trauma. It’s a thoroughly engaging if occasionally maddening book (for the behavior of the punks, not the art or writing), but I’d thoroughly recommend it. $10
