Hairstyles of the Damned

September 13, 2004
Meno (How the Hula Girl Sings
) gives his proverbial coming-of-age tale a punk-rock edge, as 17-year-old Chicagoan Brian Oswald tries to land his first girlfriend and make it through high school. Brian loves video games, metal music and his best friend, Gretchen, an overweight, foul-mouthed, pink-haired badass famous for beating up other girls. Gretchen, meanwhile, loves the Ramones and the Clash and 26-year-old "white power thug" Tony Degan. Gretchen keeps Brian at bay even as their friendship starts to bloom into a romance, forcing him to find comfort with the fetching but slatternly Dorie. Typical adolescent drama reigns: Brian's parents are having marital problems, he needs money to buy wheels ("I needed a van because, like Mike always said, guys with vans always got the most trim, after the guys who could grow mustaches"), he experiments with sex and vandalism. Meno ably explores Brian's emotional uncertainty and his poignant youthful search for meaning, both in music and in his on-again, off-again situation with Gretchen; his gabby, heartfelt and utterly believable take on adolescence strikes a winning chord. Meno also deals honestly with teenage violence—though Gretchen's fights have a certain slapstick quality, Brian's occasional bouts of anger and destruction seem very real. He's a sympathetic narrator and a prime example of awkward adolescence, even if he doesn't have much of a plot crafted around him. Author tour.
(Sept.)

Forecast:
This B&N Discover pick will appeal to alterna-adolescents and adults alike.

February 1, 2005
Adult/High School -Set in Chicago's South Side in the early 1990s, this novel follows a year in the life of high school student Brian Oswald. His friend Gretchen, a heavyset, fight-provoking, punk-music fan, travels with him through the adolescent world of shopping malls, music stores, and suburban streets. And Brian is madly in love with her. Unfortunately, Gretchen loves Tony, a 20-something white-power hooligan who hangs out in arcades to pick up impressionable high school girls. Brian spends the first half of the book trying to build up enough courage to ask Gretchen out. When he makes his feelings known, their relationship is severed. For a time, he moves on and away from her. Trouble between his parents and issues of peer pressure flesh out the skeleton of this work. Written as a first-person narrative, the novel brings Brian to life by making full use of those colorful expletives and sexual jokes that high school boys love so much. The teen is not a nerd or a jock, but lives in a space between those stereotypes. Yet he struggles desperately to find his niche, circulating from cliques as diverse as the D& D geeks to the hyper-violent skinheads. Meno plays with music in a fashion reminiscent of Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity" (Penguin, 1996). The story winds its way back to Gretchen, who inadvertently leads Brian to realize that punk, too, is its own form of a fabricated identity. In the end he learns that he is Brian Oswald -and he's okay with that." -Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale"

Copyright 2005 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2004
Meno's third novel is a funny, hard-rocking first-person tale of teenage angst and discovery. Brian, a reluctant junior in a Catholic high school on the Far South Side of Chicago, and his best friend, Gretchen, with whom he is falling in love, and who outweighs him and is way tougher and hipper (she has dyed her hair pink), spend a lot of time driving around and listening to music. It's 1990, Gretchen's mother is dead, Brian's folks are estranged, and punk rock is their gospel. After writing about a 10-year-old in " Tender as Hellfire" (1999) and an ex-con in " How the Hula Girl Sings" (2001), Meno now revels in the massive confusion and helpless bravado of adolescence as he portrays misfit teens dismayed by adult misery, weirded out by their suddenly alien bodies, and angry over racism and class prejudice. This is all worthy if familiar stuff, and although Meno fails to dig deeply, he does write with verve and will entertain readers who find tales of teen misadventure and rock and roll irresistible.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)