From Publishers Weekly
"Of course, we're all trying to find ourselves. It's when you have other people looking for you that you know you're really lost," muses Juliet, the former stripper, prostitute, speed addict and resident of an ecoterrorist commune at the center of Laura Denham's first novel, Have You Seen Me? After an unconventional but relatively wholesome upbringing by hippie parents in Northern California in the 1980s, the likable, sharply observant Juliet gets swept up in San Francisco's sex industry and is soon awash in drugs and money as her "career" spins out of control, and she finally disappears into the commune. Denham has a surprisingly assured, captivating voice. She avoids the pitfalls of this potentially lurid subject matter, offering a thoughtful exploration of the effect of the 1960s counterculture on another generation of lost youth.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A child of 1960s hippies, Juliet barely remembers her British mother, who died young. She is raised by her biker father, a computer expert in the Silicon Valley back when systems people were eccentric and underpaid. While under his roof, she has her first sexual experience with his best friend, who gives her hepatitis B. After college, she drifts to San Francisco, where she falls into the sordid world of strip dancing, porno flicks, and prostitution and then pulls herself out. Like many first novels, this work is often flawed but forgivably so because it reveals something about human nature while suggesting how the author may develop. True, Juliet is strangely remote for a first-person narrator and seems surprisingly unharmed by her life; she is evidently more upset by a bad bikini shave than her own degradation. In addition, the novel's odd final episode in a Santa Cruz ecoterrorist commune doesn't ring true. Yet Juliet remains a likable character, and the novel's early pages show poetic flair and real promise. For larger fiction collections.
Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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