All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry (review)

This sensually rich, richly sensual urban fairy tale channels Weetzie Bat (BCCB 2/89) as its unnamed narrator and her friend Aurora move through the music and party scene in the Pacific Northwest. Their entrée is Aurora's dead father, a wildly successful punk musician who lived hard and died young, and though Aurora has never wanted for money, she is desperately in need of parental love and attention, as her mother has disappeared into her addiction. The narrator and her mother become Aurora's surrogate family, but it isn't enough, so when Aurora meets an enigmatic stranger, Minos, who promises her he can take her to her father, she is hooked. The narrator hooks her own enigmatic stranger, Jack, a gifted musician who mesmerizes everyone when he plays. Since people are always more attracted to Aurora, she is heartbroken but not surprised when Jack and Aurora go with Minos to LA, leaving her behind. Unable to shake a feeling of dread where Minos is concerned, the narrator goes to LA herself, where she can no longer deny what she suspects—that Minos is a minion of hell itself, and it's up to her to play Orpheus to Aurora's Eurydice. The decadent glamour of this world as the narrator portrays it hardly needs a hell to haunt it, but McCarry takes the plunge anyway, painting word pictures that rival a Hieronymus Bosch painting in their manic intensity. The narrator is an adept foil for this world of overstimulated angst and unwise compromise; she is practical and mean, and while she readily embraces the heat of her feelings for and with Jack, she doesn't lose focus: "I'm not the kind of girl they're looking for in hell. I'm not pretty; I don't play instruments; half the time I can barely draw. But I'm the girl they'll never forget, because I'm the girl who'll win." So while she may be channeling the whimsy of Block, there's a touch of recent butt-kicking heroines in there as well, making her an appealing guide through a terrifying but seductive landscape.