Near future, New York.
"It's just a little later than now and Lola Hart is writing her life in a diary. She's a nice middle-class girl on the verge of her teens who schools at the calm end of town.
"A normal, happy, girl.
"But in a disintegrating New York she is a dying breed. War is breaking out on Long Island, the army boys are flamethrowing the streets, five Presidents have been assassinated in a year. No one notices any more.
"Soon Lola and her family must move over to the Lower East Side -- Loisaida -- to the Pit and the new language and violence of the streets.
"The metamorphosis of the nice Lola Hart into the new model Lola has begun..." [jacket blurb, UK pbk, 1994]
"The book is told in diary form by 12-year-old Lola Hart, the precocious daughter of privileged and liberal parents. Set against a backdrop of daily riots, hyperinflation, and mass unemployment, the story traces Lola's abrupt descent from upper-middle class to working poor. As her poverty becomes compounded by a string of tragedies, including her father's death and her desertion by friends, Lola turns increasingly feral and violent." --Steve G.Steinberg (in Wired , January 1995).
"Random Acts obviously taps into the social breakdown and middle class panic of the present, when as Womack points out, no one feels safe and lots of people are (or certainly feel) a couple of pay packets from bankruptcy and the streets. It's also the most condensed, successful expression of concerns - the way the city is being redrawn by neo-conservative economics, the collapse of old ideas of community, the privatisation of public space -- that find expression in all of his past work." --Jim McClellan (from the intro to an interview with Jack Womack, 1995).
Check Jim McClellan's homepages on the web for full article transcript: http://www.gold.net/oneday/jim/
"Full of innocent charm and ultimate sadness." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995).
Recommended.
