Product Details
Girl Walking Backwards: A Novel

Girl Walking Backwards: A Novel
By Bett Williams

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Product Description

Skye wants what all teenagers want--to survive high school. She lives in Southern California, though, which is making that difficult. Her mother has fallen victim to the pseudo-New Age culture and insists on dragging her to consciousness-raising workshops and hypnotists. As if this weren't difficult enough, Skye falls in love with Jessica, a troubled gothic punk girl who cuts herself regularly with sharp objects. When she finds her boyfriend having sex with Jessica in a bathroom stall at a rave, her romantic illusions collapse and she has to face the fact that she's been running away from her mother's insanity. Right when things look their worst though, Skye is helped by Mol, a pagan who becomes her true friend, and Lorri, a graceful volelyball player with whom she finds real love. From them she learns how to feel authentic emotions in a culture of poseurs and New Age charlatans. In this anti-coming-of-age novel, where growing up is irrelevant, this is the best gift of all.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #242965 in Books
  • Published on: 1998-09-15
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: .70" h x 5.50" w x 8.50" l, .75 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 264 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com
Although the protagonist of Girl Walking Backwards is a young, more-or-less "out" lesbian, this not a lesbian novel so much as a classic, post-Catcher in the Rye roman à clef, closely observed and skillfully written. Skye has even fewer illusions than Holden Caulfield, but she manages to be cynical without being world-weary. She signs up for volleyball at her new high school only because the girls on the team are beautiful, then shrinks from making the first move toward them: "Making friends is such a formal thing," she reflects. "It would have been so convenient if we all drank. Puking is great bonding, holding your friend's head over the toilet seat is kind of an intimate act. Puking friends come and go, though, at least that was my experience in junior high." When she catches sight of the doomed, black-clad Jessica, Skye thinks she has found a soulmate, but Jessica turns out to be a murky reflection of Skye's mother--unhappy and unstable, feeling cheated by life. To what extent Skye will be pulled down into others' trouble is the issue beneath the more pressing questions of whom she will love, and who will love her. A first novel of unusual distinction. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
Williams confronts coming-of-age angst in this dry, often angry debut about a 16-year-old lesbian who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., with her skittish mother, a spaced-out New Age divorcee on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Despite her parents' rocky breakup, Skye's world has managed to hang together, if precariously. She volunteers to work for Planned Parenthood because "it was the only organization that really dealt with teenagers' right to privacy." Soon she becomes infatuated with Jessica, a sullen, dark-haired girl she meets in a neighborhood cyber-cafe. The one thing Skye's mother is not receptive to is her daughter's lesbianism, and clashes are inevitable when Jessica introduces Skye to a world of raves, drugs and casual sexual encounters. When Jessica has a breakdown of her own, Skye realizes that avoiding reality has its price and begins to come to terms with the key actors in her life: her mother, who wants to "heal" her but ends up in the hospital herself; her well-intentioned but absent father, who is an independent filmmaker in L.A.; her "boyfriend" Riley; Jessica's friend Mol, an exuberant, self-titled Pagan; and Lorri, a volleyball teammate who turns out to be more than just another straitlaced jock. Williams writes in clipped, unemotional prose, underscoring the theme that innocence is hard to find but that naivete is rampant (especially among adults). Somehow in this chaotic and self-indulgent California terrain, her wounded young protagonist emerges as the most reasonable voice of all.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Sixteen-year-old Skye is in the process of creating herself: smart and pretty, she has a boyfriend but dreams of finding a girlfriend. She's trying to figure out if she wants to be one of the jocks, nerds or goths or just friends with them. Both of Skye's parents are irresponsible. Her mother, for example, keeps trying to drag her into a world of cultish New Age types, threatening to withhold support for Skye's college education. Skye's efforts to get politically/socially involved necessitate avoiding adults who would prey on young people. The frightening vulnerability of being on the threshold of adulthood is convincingly re-created, and teens might identify with Skye's efforts to forge a family of choice to replace her unreliable family of origin. However, the explicit, mainly heterosexual sex scenes and a story line involving satanic abuse put this at most at the upper reaches (ages 17 and up) of the YA category; moreover, the side of teenage life shown here, with kids experimenting with drugs and sex, is one many adults disapprove of and deny in their own pasts. A promising if controversial beginning leads to an abrupt, wholly unsatisfactory ending just as Skye hits a crisis. Regretfully not recommended.?Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., NJ
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.