My Book of Life by Angel (review)

After the death of her mother, Angel escapes to the mall. There she meets Call, who has "candy" to help her feel better, and then uses her addiction to trap her into sex-work with him as her pimp. He claims to love her, but what keeps Angel in the life are the drugs and the fact that she is too ashamed to go home. After several girls, including Angel's friend Serena, mysteriously disappear from the streets, Angel decides she has to get clean and go home. She's forestalled, however, when Call kidnaps an eleven-year-old girl and forces Angel to take her out with her. Angel is determined to protect the younger girl, so she works twice as hard to make enough money for two and comes up with a plot that can get them off the streets and safely away from Call. The verse-novel form is particularly successful here as it hints at more than it says yet manages to convey the sordid machinations of Call's ambitions. More effectively, though, the haunting, spare language links Angel's story to the tragic loss of innocence that characterizes Paradise Lost, a book that she reads aloud at the request of one of her clients. Angel's descriptions of her repetitive circuit through the city, Vancouver in the 1980s, and her dope-sickness take on dimensions of nearly-but-not-quite lost beauty, innocence, agency, and hope. Powerful moments of brutality exist alongside equally powerful moments of insight in this exceptionally moving portrayal of life on the street. An author's note describes the real-life circumstances on which Angel's story is based, making her heartrending story even more immediate and tragic.