Customer Reviews

I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex (Switchblade)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A beautifully written story. Brenner has an elegant and refined voice, encompassing deep observation, wonderful ironies, and heartfelt characters. I could sense, see and feel all of the characters, and I loved the details that captured them: Marty's gums, Pedro's tarantula arms, Mohammed's salty romanticism, Anya's love of waffles.I appreciated the streaks of humor and irony, and the depth of Brenner's observations: "Dying is the only thing that makes one man equal to another." But I was really impressed by her restraint, because in choosing not to sensationalize the sex and violence in order to inflame her readers about the damages inherent in the sex industry, her delicate treatment of the material let us feel the despair, the outrage, the hopelessness intrinsic to this difficult issue in our own way.

I loved the vignette quality of this book, cinematic and tactile. While some passages are quite graphic, the whole travels like a heavy ferryboat over a glassy sea: the drip drip of great story-telling with nothing spared but nothing spare. Anya's ethereal foreign-ness is Candide-like and yet tough. The prison stop hysterical. This is a terrific book for smart people who think they know a lot. You don't.

The tale of Anya is instantly engaging and startling. The novel brings to life a seedy underworld that exists all around us. Brenner shines the light on the underworld of human sex trafficking by utilizing the brightness of her main character, the at once strong, weak and real Anya. I could not put this novel down, engaging, exciting, entertaining, but at the same time thought provoking. A+

I've never read anything quite like this! I could not put this book down, I wish I hadn't bought it right before finals week. It was a graphic and disturbing story about human trafficking and prostitution. Although the book was fiction, it did not feel like fiction at all.

Summer Brenner's I-5 is a grim and gripping noir novel about the sex slave trade: its victims, its perpetrators, and its ability to flourish in the shadowy outcrops of civilized life. Under the guise of business, Anya and other girls from Eastern Europe are plucked from the streets and brought to the U.S. by promises of work and help for their families. Kupkin, manager of the evil empire, holds them indentured and enslaved without hope of escape until all debts are paid off. He ruminates on the care he takes of his girls and his business: "forty girls have passed through orientation. Nine have worked their way out of the system after a production period of five years. Two have died...This latest enterprise has transformed Kupkin from rich to extremely wealthy."

The book begins with a slow but steady introduction to Anya, a young girl from Moldova. We meet her during a breather; she's been given a few days off from the constant hours of prostitution to rest up, to regain her appetite and plump up for another round of endless sex dates, horrible incarnations of twisted desires and pathetic release. She's been in the trade for four years and she is desperate now for the end to come, for her freedom to be granted. But a seemingly simple trip from Los Angeles to Oakland turns into a nightmare of accidents, encounters, and glimpses of freedom offered, then ripped away under Kupnik's ensnaring power.

Brenner writes boldly and with seething clarity. She hooks us first with characterization, including the girl/woman Anya who dreams of her dead babushka; a trader in bodies who quotes Pushkin; a multi-religious "Number Three Son of the First Man" who deals in body parts; and a petite prostitute whose name was changed to Cerise from Mary because few men want reminders of the Virgin when cheating on their wives (and for those who specifically do want to sleep with the Holy Mother, that and any other request can be accommodated). Brenner reels us in with a plot fluid with movement, heady with suspense, and heavy with portents, light on hope. Against all the odds of oppression, powerlessness, and vulnerability, I found myself hoping for Anya's safety and her escape. And when Brenner exacts her own harsh revenge on the abductors, traffickers, and abusers who make money in dealing in human flesh, I took grim satisfaction in seeing them suffer the awful flip of fate that they so easily conjured up for others.

Final comment: I-5 would make a GREAT movie, thrilling and moving, suspenseful and satisfying.

Harrowing, frustrating, heartbreaking, this tale of Anya tears along like a streamlined version of Gone With the Wind, Part I. I really had a transformative experience reading it, pulled along by brusque, crystal-clear prose into a kind of epiphany. Squeamish about victim stories, I ended up curiously consoled by the crushing realism: life as a series of prisons, yes - the attractive body, first of all, the mind itself, the room, the van, the freeway, the pen, the spa, the street - but always surprises happen, dignity reigns inviolate, an escape route can and does materialize, evil does self-destruct. Keep plowing through the stark injustice and you're on your way to the heart of the matter: the discovery of that burdened, struggling, infinitely precious human being we all are. As in the sutra, "May we exist in muddy water with purity like a lotus. Thus we bow to Buddha." Thus we bow to the harsh truth of I-5!

The sharp cadence and concise writing immediately drew me into the story of Anya. I grew so attached to this strong-willed heroine that I couldn't put down I-5 until I knew how her story would end.

The novel I-5 by Summer Brenner is a modern day Inanna story. We care about the heroine as if our own fate depends on her survival,liberty, and soul. The underworld where she is captive is a place without any moral compass; business overrides conscience. Like Inanna, Anya has a slender chance, almost no chance. She lives as if dead. In Anya's case, the water and bread of life, the one drop and the one crumb that bring her to life, come from two unforgettable characters.

This taut novel is wildly imaginative, fierce, and feminine. Every aspect burns with life. The setting moves from bleak wasteland, to the claustrophobic cab of a van, to the lush gardens of a luxury hotel. Through shifting perspective, the writer gives us each characters' beliefs and fantasies. Mordant dialogue, eruptive action, and

vivid physical description make this a brilliant crime novel.

A great book. By turns provocative, poignant, ironic, suspenseful. Ms. Brenner walks the dark side with beautiful insight.

Francoise Beltran

New York

I'm not really sure what makes a page turner-- it is a mystery to me

but I know one when I read one, and I was quite taken up by this book! Anya feels totally believable-- this is not a sentimental portrait (as it could have easily become) for she is a complex survivor, tricked into sexual slavery. The sex scene that sticks in my mind is still vivid, but not meant to provoke-- she is doing a job, and the details are gritty, and the writing is clipped, like the sound of high heels on rough cement. Where will she take us?