Ballads of Suburbia

July 1, 2009
Kuehnert follows her strong debut, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (2008), with an intensely real and painfully honest novel of high-school anxiety. Kara enters her freshman year without her best friend, while her parents are on the verge of divorce. Her antidote for stress? She cuts herself. She bonds with the eccentric new girl, Maya, who shares her love of Manic Panic hair dye and the Ramones, and starts hanging out at Scoville Park with other troubled teens, including Cass, who drops acid to cope with her mothers mental illness, and Quentin, who is hooked on heroin. Members of the punk-rock clique spend weekends relieving their pain with copious amounts of sex, drugs, and booze, and weekdays writing in a notebook titled Stories of Suburbia, a collection of what Kara calls ballads meant to shatter the myth of a quiet, safe suburbia. The dramatic climax borders on excessive, but with a slew of multidimensional characters and a heavy dose of authentic teen angst, Kuehnert nails the raw vulnerability of teendom and delivers a hard-hitting and mesmerizing read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)