Customer Reviews

De la Sole

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Dempsey's De La Sole outlines a freewheeling, almost-love-story between a heroine who's too cute and a hero who's too shy - complicated by an inconvenient boyfriend with a taste for jazzy-shoes, a couple of foul-mouthed thugs, and some friends who don't know when to back off.

Can Tim oust Doug, and take his place in Jane's affections? Can Jane claim her inner rebel, and become the woman she's always dreamed of being? Will Mike and Trish ever stop giving them a hard time? And what's up with Doug's shoes, anyway?

An ill-guided attempt to answer these questions leads to mayhem, kidnapping, as tough a cast of characters as you'd ever hope to meet - and a dance-opportunity that might make or break these alliances once and for all.

Dempsey's first novel touches on themes of love, friendship, and family without taking any of them too seriously, or going the expected, predictable, pathos-ridden route. This slim volume is a quick and easy read, and would be appropriate for young people were it not for an excess of appalling language. The linguistic choices Dempsey makes are relatively character-appropriate, but actually seem to stand in the way of deeper character development at times. While the reader finds it easy to identify with hapless Tim or too-cute Jane - or even their erstwhile friends, the tough and savvy Trish, and the dim beefcake Marc - their characterization would benefit from expansion and greater depth. This holds doubly true for the `villains' of Dempsey's book, who seem to rely on invective and ethnicity for distinguishing characteristics.

Wending their way through several bars - seedy and respectable; straight, lesbian, and `jazzy'; inviting and threatening - the characters ultimately discover aspects of themselves the reader would never have guessed at, and end up more self-aware and able to make stronger choices. Jane goes from being, "...ludicrously cute. If Jane were a dessert she would have been strawberry shortcake: sweet, blonde-and-white, and filled with berries," to a more evolved state of rebellion and even bitterness. The ever-earnest Tim even manages to overcome himself and discover, "what most people go a lifetime without realizing: The majority of the rules you learn in life are wrong, false, heinous, and evil."

On the whole, Da La Sole manages to pack a lot of action, an ongoing philosophy, and a cast of memorable characters into a quick-and-easy one hundred pages. A considerable accomplishment, indeed.

[...]

Imagine that ridiculous story you always have to tell. The one that your friends have to cajole you into repeating when cornered at parties? Yes, that one.
Here I'm using ridiculous in the best possible sense if the word; i.e. absurd and preposterous. This is how Lisa Dempsey's "De La Sole" strikes one.
It is a late night excursion into the dark backwards. The place where everyone you meet seems to speak a secret language and NOBODY wants to know your name. "After Hours" meets an episode of "Seinfeld".
Your guess is as good as mine as to just who her actual protagonist is; I'm going with Tim, since the book opens and closes with his perspective. Tim is the after-college-ish everyman. You know the guy. The one mooning at the water cooler or, more likely, the Starbuck's line over that one girl he can't seem to get up the nerve to honestly express his feelings to. And boring his friends to tears and jeers with his puppy dog behavior.
So we are invited, or more accurately, abducted onto Tim's journey of self-awakening. Clumsy to the point of being painfully honest, Tim arrives at the crossroads we all come to when we have to make the choice to stop acting the drama and suddenly, often sheepishly, just start living our lives.
Dempsey's audacious sense of humor runs rampant throughout. A scathing and often thoughtful diatribe on clubs, culture, cliques, and fashion, a sly poke at male and female conventions. She holds up a mirror to the hipster, dive-crashing culture and calls it like she sees it; almost like she's been there.
It is that kind of intimacy with ones own foibles that makes "De La Sole", and other stories like it, work for me. She writes as if she's your best friend. The one who can say and tell you ANYTHING; the one you call at 3am to affirm to you that `you can't really be such an idiot, because I'm your friend'.
Now your friend, if you're lucky enough to have a compadre as cool as Dempsey, is telling you this story at maximum volume in a smoky, crowded bar, and everyone who can overhear is riveted, and is just aching to be invited along on your next adventure. Or just struggling to stay in the proximity of your wake to be gladly, giddily swept along.
Her character Jimmy Wiggles cracks me up. There's no reason why such a mangling of verbs, nouns and adjectives should be so funny, but Jimmy's dialogue still gives me giggle fits.
So, what are you waiting for? Read this book quick and meet me down the block. Who knows where the night will take us, what dangerous characters lurk behind those beaded curtains, what revelations await us beyond those fishnet stockings, but one thing becomes clear and sure. We'll have stories worth telling at the next party where we're jammed into that corner.

De La Sole is a witty masterpiece. Each page will have you laughing out loud. The fashion references and dialog are only outmatched by the quirky characters themselves. This is a true one-of-a-kind that reminds us of the endless entertainment laughing at ourselves can provide!