Perry Stromaire's a high school senior whose family in sponsoring an exchange student for the year. Gobija Zaksauskas - "Call me Gobi," she said - is quiet and unassuming, certainly not the hot foreign girl Perry might have dreamed of, but harmless enough.
Until she asks to attend prom in her last week with them, and Perry's father decrees Perry's taking her. That Perry's friend got their band a gig in Manhattan that night is of no relevance. Maybe worse than no relevance, since his father wants Perry to focus on getting into Columbia Law School, and with regards to Perry's life, what his dad wants, his dad gets. So, off to prom!
Prom's a bust, and they don't stay long, but it turns out, Gobi really wants to go into Manhattan. Also, Gobi looks a lot different when she lets her hair down and ditches the shapeless clothes in favor of the sort of stuff that gets bouncers waving you into nightclubs. Perry's a little too gobsmacked to react until a dead body lands on the hood of his dad's Jaguar, and we're off.
Schrieber blows through the premise set-up, Perry's backstory, his family situation, all that pretty quick. They're out of the prom in less than 30 pages, and the corpse is on the hood 10 pages later. But the book is only 190 pages, so there's not much time to waste, with 5 people that need to die, plus allowing time for Perry to freak out about all the killing, to try and figure out Gobi, and start to grow a backbone.
The book doesn't really focus on the violence, in the sense of writing gun fights and martial arts or anything like that. Because it's written from Perry's perspective, and at the start, he's not there when Gobi goes about her business. Later, he's there, but he's not aware enough to register that sort of thing. The gunfire is deafening, or his mind locks on the image of blood burbling from the mouth of a man she's just stabbed.
Instead, it's Perry vacillating between whether he's going to stick with this or not, trying to get something out of Gobi about why she's doing all this, as she casually pulls him apart. Occasionally their conversations are funny, when she teases him about things she overheard because she's tapped the phone lines, but usually it feels more like she's doing it to manipulate him. Goad him into defying his father, because it helps her. But she could just intimidate him. She even does a few times, to varying effect, but not always, and not always as her first approach. And so it's a bit of a mystery for us (I don't think Perry is thinking enough to wonder) of why she bothers talking or answering his questions.
Schrieber also has each chapter begin with a prompt from a college entrance exam, the university listed in parentheses. These are usually meant to reflect something about the chapter itself - the prompt for the chapter after the corpse hits the hood asks to reflect on a moment when thinking as usual wasn't possible, for example. It's a cute conceit, though it mostly made me relieved I don't have to deal with that crap any longer.
'At first I didn't think I'd even be able to play - I had way too much going on in my mind - but to my profound surprise, my fingers didn't seem to care. Apparently, if you wanted to rock, it didn't matter if you had explosives in the basement, or a father with a chronic problem with keeping his dick in his pants, or a crazed ex-Blackwater employee with some religious conviction for ripping your head off.
Hell, it might have helped.'
No comments:
Post a Comment