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Crooked [Paperback]

Louisa Luna (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)

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Paperback, May 7, 2002 $19.23  

Book Description

May 7, 2002
Melody is just out of prison. Faced with the absence of her brother, who's serving life in San Quentin, and hardened by her own experiences in lock-up, Mel sturggles to adjust to the harsh realities of life on the outside. She quickly discovers that freeedom is relative...she has no money, no prospects, no guidance.

Forced to return to her mother's apartment in Marin County and take a job houling portable toilets, Mel finds herself drinking too much and hanging out with her old gang again. Haunted by glimpses of her own harrowing girlhood and of the mysterious circumstances that put her in prison in the first place, she slowly, bravely begins to forge a potential path toward redemption and escape.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Luna's second novel is a crisply written, incisive story about a violent, troubled young woman struggling to rebuild her life and come to terms with her crime after being released from a California prison. As the novel opens, protagonist Melody Booth has just finished a three-year sentence for her role in a brutal murder engineered by her brother, Gary, but life seems promising when her mother takes her in to help her get back on her feet. Booth immediately makes a series of bad decisions, though, beginning with her career choice: she takes a marginal job delivering portable toilets. On the personal side, her first mistake is getting involved with her brother's friend, Chick Rodriguez, a drug runner and heavy user, and before long Melody is drinking, carousing and slipping back into her old "bad girl" ways. Her downward spiral bottoms out when Chick disappears and she tracks him down at the San Francisco house of his dealer, only to arrive just in time to get in trouble with the law again when he overdoses. Luna spends a good portion of the novel delving into Melody's refusal to visit her imprisoned brother, and while many of those passages are effective, the siblings' ultimate meeting proves to be anticlimactic. But the remaining material leading up to Melody's downfall is solid, despite the ongoing presence of several prison-novel clich‚s. Overall, Luna has done a service by telling a familiar story from a woman's perspective, and this novel represents a sound follow-up to her success with Brave New Girl.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Louisa Luna is the author of Brave New Girl and Crooked. She lives in New York City.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: MTV Books; Original edition (May 7, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0743439953
  • ISBN-13: 978-0743439954
  • Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,283,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

11 Reviews
5 star:
 (6)
4 star:
 (2)
3 star:
 (2)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read book from a huge talent, July 15, 2002
By 
joe e. kruft (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Crooked (Paperback)
To steal from the title of her first book, Louisa Luna is indeed a brave new girl. In her sophomore effort, Crooked, she proves beyond any doubt that she is a voice that will continue to sound for many years to come. In many ways, Crooked takes up where Brave New Girl left off. The characters are different, but the struggles remain. Ms. Luna's particular gift is to get directly to the grit of human existence, and its effects are sometimes appalling, sometimes hilarious, sometimes makes us clench our teeth and yell "no-no-no" -- much like life itself. But always, her accounts come across as infinitely true and brutally honest. At the core of her characters is a longing. Ms. Luna's ample talent requires us to see the despair in each and every character she has created, and yet also allows us to see/feel the universitality of the human experience. Ms. Luna is a literary gem.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Astounding, December 31, 2002
This review is from: Crooked (Paperback)
This is a tightly written, sharply visualised novel -- really a work of literature, which might explain some of the disappointed reviews I've seen elsewhere from people who may have been expecting another link from the great sausage-factory of Music Television Books. Ms. Luna has created, in Melody Booth, a character whose inner essence is so coldly and clearly written that she actually suffuses the text with a luminous vitality. Despite what may appear to the prejudiced as a confusing or even pointless ending, I think it is ultimately a novel of redemption. Melody may well be a modern answer to Lermontov's 'Fatalist'.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars UHG, October 12, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Crooked (Paperback)
If MTV wants to publish a second book by one of its authors, they should think twice. Perks was great and then Pieces was a piece. Brave New Girl was good and Crooked is just trifling. I've read all the MTV books and have found that the books that their writers write after they leave MTV (i guess it's like the minor leagues for novelists) are 1000 times better. Nersessian's Manhatten Loverboy after the F-Up, Goldberg's Living Dead Girl after Fake Liar Cheat, for instance, are both great adult novels. Maybe that's why MTV didn't publish them. Whatever. Crooked is decent reading if your 15, not so great if you're over 20.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
My mother picked me up in Holding and smelled like baby powder and Vaseline lotion when she hugged me. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Tommy John, Diamond Duke, Cal Trimmer, Chick Rodriguez, Melody Booth, San Anselmo, San Rafael, Ria Diaz, Freddy Ramer, Gary Booth, Marjorie Welch, Mel Booth, Where's Chick
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