D'extase et d'amour féroce

by Dylan Landis

Le bouleversant roman d'apprentissage d'une jeune femme dans le New York bohème des années 1970.New York, Greenwich Village, années 1970. Rainey Royal, quatorze ans, habite une maison autrefois élégante mais aujourd'hui délabrée. Elle vit avec son père, musicien de jazz culte, qui mène une existence bohème dans cette grande demeure ouverte à tous. Sa mère ayant déserté le foyer pour aller vivre dans un ashram, Rainey est livrée à elle-même, proie facile pour les protégés de son père qui vont et viennent dans la maison. À l'extérieur, l'adolescente rebelle se révèle forte et cruelle, violente même, jouant du pouvoir de séduction qu'elle exerce sur les autres pour trouver son chemin.

Genres: Fiction, New York, Historical Fiction, Coming Of Age, Young Adult, Short Stories, Literary Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 9, 2014

About the author

Dylan Landis is the author of the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors' Choice, and the linked story collection Normal People Don't Live Like This. She has won an O. Henry Award and published fiction in Bomb, Tin House and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dylan Landis’s captivating and unnerving novel “Rainey Royal,” set in Manhattan of the 1970s and early ’80s, is not a thriller, but it smolders with these loaded questions: How far will an adolescent girl go to gain a sense of belonging; and how can her unaimed sexual power put others, and herself, at risk? Reading this book, following its characters along a shaky tightrope that stretches between vulnerability and cruelty, confidence and catastrophe, you may thank heaven, or St. Catherine of Bologna — Rainey’s chosen protectress, the patron saint of artists — that you are not a teenage girl. That is, of course, unless you are one; in which case you can take heart in the author’s intimation that this perilous transit can be achieved with something that ends up feeling, in a small way, like grace."
Liesl Schillinger, New York Times

I like to quote reviews that put their fingers on the very delicate pulse that beats within a book and Liesl Schillinger gets to the heart of things when she speaks of a "captivating and unnerving novel", "a shaky tightrope that stretches between vulnerability and cruelty, confidence and catastrophe".

This book was everything that I wanted Salinger to be: reckless, direct, brave, unapologetic, unadorned, psychologically naked, elegant without being affected, smart without being pretentious, fiery without being theatrical.

A penetrating and heartrending portrait of an adolescent girl, caught between her need for innocence and her hunger for self-affirmation. Greenwich Village in the 70's, a personal romanticized obsession of mine, is depicted with a quiet and subdued fierceness very much akin to Rachel Kushner's in "The Flamethrowers".

A struggle, an ascent, a shedding of skin and a rebirth that will stay with you for a very long time.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dylan Landis' first novel knocks it out of the ball park. I read it in galleys and so admired it I wrote a cover blurb: "Every woman has known a Rainey Royal. The coolest girl in school, the most daring, the most beautiful, yet the one who could turn on you—and then, bewilderingly, turn back. What makes a Rainey Royal, and her effect on everyone she encounters—that chaos of yearning, cruelty, woundedness, seeking, and human poetry—we needed a great writer to show us, and here she is. Dylan Landis has written a spare, elegant novel that’s pure nerves, pure adrenaline. Should carry a warning, do not read at bedtime.”

The novel is told through interlinked short stories from three points of view, Rainey, her best friend Tina, and Leah, the girl they alternately cosset and torment. The Royal household is ground zero here, a bohemian chaos in Greenwich village in the '70s, headed by her father, a jazz musician and center of a musical near-cult, filling the house with his proteges and hangers on, a dangerous environment for a beautiful girl trying out her power in the world. In certain ways, this seemed a companion novel to Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers--the time, the setting, though Kushner's heroine is a transparent newbie from out of town, and Landis' younger protagonist is part of that world, wounded and willful and itching to take it on.

One of the story-chapters was a 2014 O'Henry award winner.

I waited to post here until it was out, because to hear of a great book you can't buy until next year is really unfair!

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very nearly a DNF; despite the great things I heard about this, I didn't understand why it was set in the 1970s nor did I find anything likeable about Rainey. There are times when unlikeable main characters still lead to great books, ones that make you think but here? Not so much. If only we'd gotten more about her art, or some reason to live in her world.

ARC provided by publisher.

[Larry H · Rating 5 out of 5]

When we first meet Rainey Royal, the protagonist of Dylan Landis' exquisite novel of interconnected vignettes, she is 14 years old, living in 1970s-era New York City. Her mother left to allegedly live on an ashram, leaving Rainey to live with her father, Howard, a jazz musician of some renown, who acts as a Pied Piper and mentor of sorts for young, aspiring musicians—particularly women.

These "acolytes," as Rainey refers to them, show up, take what they can from Howard (although he usually does more taking), and leave when either they get tired of the lifestyle or Howard tires of them. Rainey is forced to share her living space and possessions with these people, and understand she must share her father with so many.

Rainey is fierce and feisty, but at the same time, she's desperately in need of love and attention. She's getting more than she bargained for with Gordy, Howard's best friend and fellow musician, who lives with them, but while she knows his affections are wrong, they make her feel needed at the same time. She's also just becoming aware of her sexuality, and the effect it can have on others—her teachers, the male musicians that surround Howard, even strangers.

"She sends signals to everyone, all the time, even if the signals are submerged, like telexes in cables on the ocean floor. It's what she does."

Rainey has a love-hate relationship with her best friend, Tina, who craves Rainey's approval and love, but also wants to be a part of the circle that surrounds Howard. Even as she and Rainey grow into adulthood, she never quite discloses the extent of her relationship with Howard. But more than anything, it is Rainey to whom she and others are drawn, including Leah Levinson, a fellow student, whose life seems to eke along colorlessly until she is with Rainey again.

Rainey Royal follows Rainey, as well as Tina and Leah, from their teenage years through their mid-20s, through emotional, humorous, angry, even criminal escapades. Rainey is a tremendously talented artist in need of someone to nurture her talent, but she is also desperate to find someone to love her, someone willing to give, not just take from her, and all of her relationships cause her happiness and hurt at the same time.

I thought this was an absolutely terrific book. Rainey is a complex, beautifully drawn character, flawed yet sympathetic, one whose actions you might not always agree with, but you can see from where they originate. Landis is a fantastic writer, and there were so many sentences that I just marveled over. I worried when I started the book that the whole novel-in-vignettes concept would make the story feel incomplete, as if we were just getting glimpses of the characters and action instead of becoming fully immersed, but Landis did a good job of ensuring continuity, even as the novel progressed through the years.

I'd love to see another novel that follows up on Rainey, Tina, and Leah. Landis has a love for her characters and it truly showed, making Rainey Royal a book worth reading, for so many reasons.

See all of my reviews (and other stuff) at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo....

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a christmas gift from my husband. Hurray! thanks mr pastore.
This book is right up my street -it's set in Greenwich village in the 70s and is about a teenage girl living a bohemian life with her uninterested jazz musician father, and his a-bit-too-interested friend.

The writing is great - think Janet Fitch, Rachel Kushner, Francesca Lia Block, Michelle Tea - pretty much all my favourite writers, and it would have been a five star book for me had it not been so goddamn episodic.

so as such, there's not much in the way of a storyline, which kind of makes it drifty, dreamy, and perhaps - as husband suggested - a bit more like real life?

I think it's one thats going to stay with me though, what it lacks in plot it makes up for in atmosphere and feels. It also confirms my theory of - if Janet Fitch says its good, it's good. More novels please Dylan Landis! especially as I'm just sitting around waiting for the next Fitch novel.

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

Look, I get it: fourteen-year-old girl tries to deal with her new sexuality, her loneliness after her mother leaves, the drive inside her that demands that she create art. But nothing about the way that those urges are expressed is particularly palatable, and I don't want to read another coming-of-age story based on an older man preying on a teenager.

AND that robbery. Get out! I liked the St. Cath element, briefly, and I somewhat enjoy the art, but the Gordy (ugh) is just too much to handle. Tina and Rainey are the counterculture mean girls and I can't like Rainey enough to get into this. Abandoned around page 65.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, a big thanks to GoodReads FirstReads and Soho Press for enabling me to be one of the early readers of this collection. It's an absolute winner!

Years ago, I remember reading this line: “A father has two key jobs: to love and to protect.” Rainey Royal has lost the lottery in the father department. Her father, famous jazz musician Howard, is incapable of doing either. Or, in Dylan Landis’s own words: “Howard’s attention is like the sun. Too much burns the edges of her leaves, yet the atmosphere is thin without it.”

If truth be known, Rainey hasn’t done all that well in the mother department either. Her mother Linda left her in the care of her father, taking off for an ashram. It’s now up to Rainey to get it right…or at least, get it to the point where she can survive.

Rainey isn’t exactly what you call a likeable character. She’s a bully, a thief, and at times, a sadist. She is also distinctly human. Her friend Leah – the focus of Ms. Landis’s previous collection, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, reflects, “She loves Rainey Royal, who is both cruel and kind, who works with objects that belong to the dead, who can sweep the gaze across Leah’s white-box life and make her feel, if only for an hour, that she is the most thrilling person Rainey knows.”

Insights like these abound. This is a breathtakingly astute book, harrowing, poignant, and spot-on. At one point, when Rainey is violated by one of her father’s many acolytes, there’s this exchange: “It sounds like something went very wrong, baby girl.” Rainey: “Will you throw him out?” Howard: “I’ll give him hell…Will that do?” Through this rather minimalistic exchange, the reader cannot help but intimately feel the sense of betrayal.

About five years ago, I read Normal People, and was astounded at Dylan Landis’ ability to create such authentic, aching teens at the cusp of adulthood. Her character Leah Levinson, was a middle-class girl trying to find her way in a world of more damaged peers. Dylan Landis has taken this path even further; Rainey Royal is even more complex and – if possible – more “alive.” This book is an achievement and I give it an enthusiastic five stars.

[Pamela]

What a great pleasure and a great excitement. Landis has claimed her own fictional vocabulary and her own unique take on a certain type of girlhood and girlhood friendship. It's coincidental that I read this book at the same time as Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, but their delineation of the intense feelings (of love, dependency, competition, and resentment) at the heart of an adolescent friendship are strongly kin.

Rainey is a character who appeared in Landis's previous work of fiction, Normal People Don't Live Like This, most powerfully in a knock-'em-dead story called "Jazz." Now she reappears as a fourteen-year-old with a best friend named Tina. It's the early seventies in New York City. Rainey's mother has disappeared to an ashram; her father, a prominent jazz musician, sleeps with an unending stream of female protégées and tacitly allows his best friend to sexually molest Rainey. If this sounds dark, the darkness is offset by Landis' hypervivid visuality and bebop prose. Leah Levinson, also a character in Normal People, sometimes enters in as a third party who--both afraid of and entranced by Rainey and Tina--reshuffles the deck. The stories proceed chronologically until the heartbreaking final one in which Rainey is twenty-two years old.

Another thing I very much admire about Landis's work is that she makes shit happen (forgive my own prose). People DO stuff in these stories--terrible, freaky, resonant stuff. But not because the author is desperately trying to grab our attention. Rather, because there are real stakes for these characters. They feel and need deeply, and this makes them capable of scaring themselves and others. Rainey is angry. She's needy. She's smart. She loves sexual attention but wants to be in control of it. She's trouble. She's going somewhere. Where?

[Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, unsurprisingly so given my love for fiction set in NYC, particularly that set in and around the 1970s.

This book, Landis' full length debut novel, tells the story not only of Rainey, who gives the book its title, but also that of her friends, Tina and Leah. Rainey lives in West 10th St with her jazz pianist father Howard along with an always changing cast of young musicians and his ever present friend,Gordy, her mother having left to join a commune before the start of the novel.

Beginning in the early 1970s, the book charts the main characters' dysfunctional lives, complicated by the loose values of the older 'responsible' characters, all against the backdrop of a city that is skilfully brought alive through the prose of Landis.

Aside from Rachael Kushner's recent book, The Flamethrowers, most of the books I have read featuring this setting have included male characters, but I often empathised with the female protagonists in this novel, despite their often questionable behaviour, particularly during their teenage years. Serious themes are threaded throughout the novel, and are handled skilfully by Landis, in the way they affect her characters,who are ultimately victims of the momorals of a different era.

Well worth reading!

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 2 out of 5]

picked up an arc- I didn't really like the characters at all. It's not so much any sort of vulgarity that bothers me, someone had mentioned it being 'vulgar'. I just couldn't warm up to it. The one thing that did seem to pull me in for a while was the whole 'artist' thing. I am an artist, therefore I can use women, and expose my child to far too much sexuality because I am talented... that sort of thing annoys me. Bohemian living is great, so long as it doesn't involve children that are exposed to adult perversity. I think there will be people who love this story, again- it's not bad writing, I just couldn't get into it.

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rainey Royal is a delicious book. The writing is evocative of 1970's Greenwich Village and the type of belief systems that many people shared then - open relationships, lots of pot smoking and drugs, non-invasive child rearing, and non-existent boundaries. The novel acutely shows the dangers and joys of these times.

The novel starts when Rainey is 14 years old. She lives with her father, Howard Royal, a jazz pianist. Rainey's mother abandoned them for a Boulder, Colorado Ashram when Rainey was 12. Rainey likes to keep her mother's memory alive by using her tea rose scent every day, and collecting objects that once belonged to her. Also living in their home is Howard's best friend, Gordy, a jazz musician, who comes into Rainey's room during the night and abuses her. Howard acts oblivious to this. The house is filled with Howard's acolytes, young musicians who share Howard's bed for shelter and music lessons. Howard and Gordy share the women and when Rainey's mother lived there, she went from Howard's bedroom to Gordy's and back on a regular basis.

Rainey is an almost feral child. She attends a progressive school where the teachers and counselor are worried about her because of her openly seductive behaviors towards adults. Rainey's best friend is Tina, another child who lives without much guidance from adults and whose home life is a mystery to Rainey. Together, they do things that are criminal and are lucky that they don't get caught. They also act mean towards other students who revere them.

Rainey is a talented artist. She makes tapestries to memorialize people. The tapestries are created from objects, letters, clothing, and jewelry that once belonged to someone. Sometimes she is lucky and is able to sell one but most of the time she is broke. She fantasizes about escaping her living situation but it appears she needs Howard and he needs her.

The brownstone belongs to Howard's mother who is now in a nursing home. Technically, the house has been left to Rainey but Howard is the trustee until Rainey turns 25. Gradually, because he earns next to no money, Howard sells off the fixtures and furniture from the house, all to Rainey's dismay.

The novel is structured with interwoven short stories that take us through Rainey's life from the age of 14 to 25. The stories are mostly linear and examine different aspects of Rainey's life and the people who impact her. At times funny, poignant, horrific, and tender, the reader is guided though the life of a child and young woman who has had to make her way against the odds.

I had never heard of Dylan Landis prior to reading this book but I intend to look for her future books and get her previous novel, Normal People Don't Live Like This. She is a writer to savor.

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like coming-of-age fiction about teenage girls, or things set in bohemian New York City in the 1970s, give this a try! It's got a lovely cover.

[christa · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the signature scene of “Rainey Royal,” the titular teen-aged temptress, smelling purposefully of tea oil (rubbed between her toes, actually), and her best friend Tina Dial are trailing one of those couples-in-love, all linked arms, nuzzling and wake of gorgeous, enviable cape. The girls are fingering a gun they don’t know much about and they’re pretty sure they aren’t going to rob the couple. They’re just practicing.

But these girls are wild cards, so who knows. Earlier scenes find the duo using the a series of teeth licking gestures, position shifts and practiced looks to intimidate a school’s worth of citizens -- including their teachers. There is Leah, who could be beautiful with the right French braid, so should they run cruel initiation on her or dress her in a sheer top and parade her past bug-eyed sickos. Or there is a certain teacher at the school who must be dating a certain other teacher and Rainey practices her evil sexual weaponry on both.

So, when writer Dylan Landis directs these two girls to this situation, it’s impossible to know what could happen. They’re sexy wild cards, completely unpredictable and Rainey Royal, seemingly, is without a basic comprehension of the cause-effect relationship. You’d misdiagnose her as a sociopath if you didn’t know her home life was a completely awesome clusterfuck hosted by two heavies from the NYC jazz scene. Either way, a reader is right to feel a little green in the belly and to maybe stop breathing for a few pages.

“Rainey Royal” is set in a gigantic house furnished with expensive things in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. Rainy Royal’s father is a jazz icon-slash-commune leader who takes in all sorts of irregularly talented buskers and the like. These acolytes, as they’re called, come and go and sleep with Howard and sometimes crash on the floor of Rainey’s Bubalicious-pink bedroom floor. Howard’s best friend Gordy lives there, too, and until Rainey’s mom Linda lit out for an ashram in Colorado, the maternal figure was not-at-all secretly bed-hopping between both men’s rooms in a situation she compares to a grown-up sleepover. Gordy, anyway, is a pedaphile who makes his way into Rainey’s room every night so he can caress her hair or give her a backrub that, basically, makes her question the line between back and side boob.

And does Howard know about this? Shrug. Probably. When Rainey is later raped by one of his horn players, he dismisses it by proclaiming the kid is a genius and suggesting that she must have used a nonverbal cue to indicate it was okay. Anyway, he’s been feeding her a daily dose of birth control for years.

Meanwhile, Rainey is an artist, the only thing that really centers her. At first she’s failing this or that, but accumulating a series of amazing sketches. Later, she becomes a sort of tapestry wizard who collects the important artefacts of the dead and creates these lush biographical quilts decorated with cufflinks, portraits, letters, favorite clothing fabrics and pearls. In a later scene, after Rainey is done tormenting squares, this lands her in a situation where she plays the role of a memory for an 80-year-old man while fashioning something from his dead wife’s things.

This book is intense -- for a while. It’s terrifying to watch what girls with this much power will do with it; It’s terrifying to watch what happens in a home where a girl has nothing to keep anyone out of her bedroom. But then it just sort of peters. In the latter half of the book, Lisa and Tina voice a few of the chapters, which makes everything a little disjointed. Neither is very fully realized -- although, apparently these characters exist in Landis’s earlier work, so maybe they’re more precisely drawn there -- and Rainey come to seem pretty flat -- especially compared to the first screen grabs of the girl.

Still, more than half the book is super-charged and powerful and features a truly unique cast in unusual circumstances. And, somehow, wound up in all that intensity are these touches of dark humor. Yow.

[Doreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 and so close to 5.

If a book could be a date, then Rainey Royal would be the gorgeous, feral girl with the sometimes uncertain gaze who would take you, as a surprise, to witness something at once brutal and carnal then laugh at your discomfort, but later slip her damp hand into yours and kiss you on the cheek and tell you what a good time she'd had, and just mesmerize you with her rawness and brilliance and ineffable, unstudied style. She'd inspire you to write in breathless run-on sentences and remind you of the power of literature and make you ache to get back to writing that book you poured your heart into but, for whatever reason, never finished.

Rhapsodizing aside, this book looks at friendship and family and loyalty and betrayal with an honest, unflinching eye. Dylan Landis writes without fear, but with a talent that nearly overwhelmed me. I am wildly jealous of her, which is one of the highest compliments I could ever give an author. Great stuff, from an author now on my Must-Read list.

But why, you might ask, no 5-star rating if I loved it so deeply? Because this whirlwind of a book isn't something I'd want to revisit too often. It brought up old aches but taught me nothing new, and it awed me and saddened me but couldn't make me laugh. The book is as glorious as the protagonist it's named for, but it's also just as maddening in that it's close, so close to being great. By my admittedly subjective standards, it's not quite there, but oh, what a time we had together.

[NancyKay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give this 17 stars if I could. This book was so exciting for me.

I became aware of Landis through hearing her speak to Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm podcast. Even though the interview prompted me to get this book, I still had no idea how much pleasure this novel would give me. Everything about it was so surprising, so finely-observed.

Rainey Royal is 14 in 1972 when the novel opens; her mother has left her father, who is a working jazz musician; she lives with him and a bunch of young jazz musicians he collects and fucks, in a townhouse on W10th St that belongs to her grandmother. Rainey has to fend for herself emotionally with her narcissistic monster of a father, his creepy best friend who lives in the house and likes to "tuck her in" at night, and the ever-changing troop of young musicians who are in and out of her room all the time.

The novel traces 12 years from there to show us Rainey, and her friends Tina and Leah, growing from awkward adolescent students at Urban Day School to young women more or less making it; along the way Rainey goes from being an artistically talented and inappropriately provocative tendril to a self-actualized artist.

Landis portrays the world of hippy Greenwich Village perfectly, and NYC in the 70s in general, with all its grimy menace and decay. Her insights into the inner lives of her 3 female POV characters is masterful. I gobbled this up in a day and a half, and will probably read it again soon.

[Rue · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this title at the ALA Convention, earlier this year. I came home with a stack of books and quickly weeded out two-thirds of the titles. Rainey Royal drew me in and held my attention. I was intrigued by the setting, the characters and the unique format of the story. I thought it would be disconcerting to read a series of stories separated by gaps in the timeline. I was quite wrong. Each chapter has the ability to stand on its own. As I read through the life of Rainey I felt like an old high school friend that bumped into her 20 years after graduation - I felt like Rainey was sharing the pivotal moments of her life with me. I didn't need to hear all the filler, in between, I just got to hear the best parts. However the thing that pushes this review to five stars, is the descriptive language. Ms. Landis has used the English language to the best of its ability. There is a wonderful, succinctness to the words the author chooses - just enough to build emotion and paint a picture, without drowning the reader in pages of adjectives. An engaging, satisfying read!

[nique · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm torn - while I love the way Dylan Landis seamlessness weaves words together like a poetic tapestry, I found the limitless exploration of Rainy Royal and her friends somewhat bare and unfulfilling. The book follows Rainey Royal through her teenage years to early adulthood. Thematically she's a tortured artist who misses her mother, and verges on the borderline of loving her hippy, cult leading father too much. Yet as the years pass Rainey herself does not seem to grow, I felt like it was the same 15 year old girl when she was 25. There were real opportunities for the characters to expose the raw complexities underpinning themselves and their interaction with the world but I didn't feel with them any struggles, nor did I find myself wanting or expecting anything from them. So, if it's a captivating story your after, to me this doesn't quite get there. However if like me you have a fondness for a somewhat curuitous style of writing, flowery and well expressed then I would definitely recommend Rainey Royal. I look forward to Reading more from Landis.

[Oriana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am doing some updating for allllll the books I was too lazy / busy to review in 2014. In case that matters to anyone.

This was a buzz book at BEA that I was very excited to get (thank you Karen Queen of Goodreads!), but I wasn't super thrilled by it. It's told in pieces, and while the setting (ahhh 70s NYC) was great, the characters were hard to love — mostly they're young and find it easy to be cruel, to be changeable, to be confused and afraid. The adults are irresponsible and selfish and shitty.

I don't know, really. Truthfully I don't remember hardly anything about this, and it's only been a few months since I read it. I'm pretty sure it left me feeling unsatisfied though.

[Mary Kay Zuravleff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover of my copy is wavy because my palms were sweating the whole time. Dylan Landis knows how to unnerve a reader, even as the reader is appreciating being unnerved! Rainey Royal has extraordinary powers, some she doesn't even understand yet; meanwhile, everyone else in her house is trying to exert their powers over her. Landis exposes great cruelty and selfishness in this novel in the service of showing Rainey's desire to be loved and her talent for stitching memories into art.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily one of my favorite reads of the year this far. Everyone knows a Rainey Royal, and they love to hate her and hate to love her.

Rainey is unlikable and impetuous, but talented and heartbroken, and Landis shows us all of that depth gracefully, through many different angles. This book works as individual stories and as an accomplished whole. It's a truly wonderful book, and I will be recommending it to anyone who asks.

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was given an advanced reader copy of this from Elle Magazine for their reader reviews and unfortunately this book just didn’t do it for me. I’ve never been terribly interested in, nor admired, the bohemian lifestyle that some artists embrace and thus insight into that world did nothing for me but make be thankful for the boring house I grew up in.

[Joanne-in-Canada · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Sharp, edgy characters and plot, and some breathtaking writing. However, I felt Landis lost her momentum in the last third of the book. The characters changed less, surprised me less, continuing along their established trajectory. Also the indicators of passing time became clunky--"They are twenty-five", "Now she is twenty-six"--or maybe I was just more aware of them towards the end.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because the author is going to be at Booktopia Vermont (2015). Not something I would have picked up on my own, but I am glad I read about Rainey and her dysfunctional father. While I had my own dysfunctional family, my home was always a safe place.

[Abby Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

engrossing and crisply written, although it felt more like a story collection than a coherent novel. slightly terrifying - is this what youth is like?

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one deserves a long well considered review when I'm at an actual computer. For now I'll just say that I'm sad to be done with it.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full Review at PANK http://pankmagazine.com/2015/02/26/re.... The takeaway: Loved everything about this book.

[Lindsay Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved how the book unfolded in vignettes. Time moved and kept of moving. Then hey we're in someone else's head now, looking at Rainey. Loved how it broke the rules. Because whose rules?!

[Lori Ostlund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rainey Royal is a magnificent character. I felt as if I were living in that strange, unpredictable, unsafe house with her.

[Cajou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chronique à venir pour sa sortie le 18/08/2016.

[Vivian Payton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Set in the turbulent 1970s, RAINEY ROYAL is a story about a vulnerable, tough girl beginning when she is at the tender age of 14. She grows up in Greenwich Village and must deal with the abandonment of her mother.

Rainey Royal lives with her father, Howard, in her grandmother’s old dilapidated brownstone. He is a jazz musician, a free spirit, and has his own “acolytes” who also live in the house and come and go as they please. He is more concerned about them than his own daughter. There is no parental guidance, so Rainey is left to grow up using her own devices. There is so much dysfunction in her life, including her father’s best friend, Gordy, who visits her bedroom every night to tuck her in or rub her back. Rainey fends off Gordy’s advances, but this carries on for many years. Howard allows this type of behavior, which wouldn’t fly in today’s world.

Rainey’s “family” are her two friends: Tina, with whom she has a very close relationship, and Leah, who she torments during their younger years at school, but then takes under her wing. Tina is the only one who knows about Rainey and Gordy. However, Tina has a relationship with Howard as a teenager that she conceals from Rainey. Leah is jealous of Rainey and Tina’s friendship, and longs to be in Tina’s shoes. Author Dylan Landis does a very good job of developing these three friends’ relationship, making them quite believable as teenage girls.

Rainey comes off as a big toughie who longs for love and attention, and looks for it in all the wrong places. For such a broken and odd-behaving girl, underneath lies a beautiful, smart young lady who loves going to museums and the library. Due to the dysfunction, she steals, threatens and plays games, “but games seem to be her particular gift, games of the art.” You see, Rainey has an artistic side to her, making “tapestries” from dead people’s belongings. She uses their clothing, jewelry, photos, buttons and whatever she thinks could possibly work to make her “quilts.” When Landis describes the “tapestries,” she gives full details of the items used, so I felt that I could visualize what they looked like.

Leah’s mother is an interior decorator, and Leah comes up with the idea that she could show Rainey’s work to her, possibly giving Rainey an opportunity to sell her artwork to her mother’s clients. Although Leah’s mother loves the artwork, Leah, jealous of Rainey’s friendship with Tina, decides not to tell Rainey. The offer could have been her big break, but it becomes Leah’s big secret.

By the end of the story, Rainey is in her 20s. She finally grows up and makes decisions on her own. She has evolved into a young woman who has found love, and has the strength to do anything. I love that about her! I also think Tina and Leah will be lifelong friends.

I decided to read this book because I, like Landis, grew up in the ’70s. At Rainey’s age of 14, when the story begins, we were vulnerable and young. We thought we knew everything and didn’t want to be told otherwise, just like Rainey. We were just trying to fit in, but Rainey, lacking the appropriate attention at home, wanted to stand out. Landis does a remarkable job of showing what it was like for such a dysfunctional girl to grow up in the ’70s --- without a mother, no less.

However, I didn’t particularly care for the choppiness of the writing, because I often felt like I had to reread sections to understand what was being said. Even in the middle of dialogue, Landis would go off on tangents that, rather than adding to the story, distracted from it.

I would like to read Landis’s debut novel, NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T LIVE LIKE THIS, as a way of comparison and to get a better idea of her writing style. Upon finishing her latest, I definitely feel there is room for a sequel. I doubt we’ve seen the last of Rainey Royal.