West End

by Noreen Lace

The haunting story of a family, a neighborhood, and a girl who longs to escape. Shadowed by the loss of her mother, her family begins to disintegrate as the narrator bears witness to friends toying with death by train, by car, and by fire, until one disappears, maybe for good. She feels she'll follow her mother to an early grave if she can't escape the madness of her own decaying life.

80 pages, Paperback

Published January 19, 2016

About the author

Originally from the Midwest, Noreen now lives in Southern California. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in national as well as international journals: The Chicago Tribune's Printers Row journal, The Oleander Review, Pilcrow and Dagger, and Vine Leaves Press, among others.

Her fiction and poetry exude the complexity of situations she's faced as well as the challenges she's overcome. They are rich in detail, diffused with empathy, and poetically written. Noreen Lace believes in the beauty of language to express the deepest, darkest parts of our beings.

West End and Life of Clouds, told in sparse prose and broken narrative, feature characters whose lives have been affected by elements outside their control with the protagonists struggling to find their own power.

Reviews

[Syndi Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was the lucky winner of a copy of this novel through a goodreads win. it is a quirky little book. it is a novel but it has the feel and emotion of a poetry book. it is very short. it is about a girl's life from girlhood to womanhood with an alcoholic mother in a not nice part of town. it is about loss, and poverty and making do. you follow her story as she grows up and becomes a mother herself and i found myself rooting for her to rise above her past and be a better mother than she had. syndi

[David Pyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bleak!!!
Disparaging magnifying glass on ghetto/mid-America life. The characters are well depicted and are screaming for help. Each character is begging for their own particular type of help in a helpless society.
It's difficult to give a solid review without spoilers.