In 1996, at 16, Nikki is the epitome of adolescent angst and anomie. A student at the exclusive L.A. County High School for the Arts, she has an ill-formed ambition to become involved with musical theater but misses school so often that she's on attendance probation. When in doubt, her solution is to get high with her friends, and she is so often high, so often dazed and confused, it's a wonder she can function. Anxious for affection, she is in love with gorgeous Michael o is openly gay fusing to believe that her friend Dan might be in love with her. Nikki is half Latina and half white, and many of her friends in L.A.'s San Gabriel Valley are Latinx. Nikki tells her story, often in the form of a monologue, in her own vernacular voice, filled with '90s teenage slang. That voice, the best thing in the novel (with its all-too-familiar story), comes at the reader in an appealing tumble-rush and hypnotic fashion.

A once-ambitious teenage girl searches for her place in Los Angeles after enduring neglect and family tragedy.Nikki Darling cuts class at the LA County High School for the Arts to drive around suburban Los Angeles in beater cars with her friends, smoking joints and listening to post-punk and riot grrrl bands. She's a "brooding musical theater gal," struggling with depression and loneliness behind a screen of tough talk and withdrawn behavior. But when a beautiful and mysterious student named Claire Chang is taken out of school after a supposed suicide attempt, Nikki grows worse, avoiding homework and stifling her aspiration to act. Instead, she pals around with a cast of endearing misfits who specialize in talking smack without saying anything at all. There's Chelo, a loudmouthed stoner with red hair and thrift-store duds; Mike, a queer kid forced to sleep in his parents' garage; and Dan, an immature ladies' man who catches Nikki's eye. Grown-ups are inscrutable or unhelpful, from Ms. Lavoi, the English teacher who encourages Nikki to read Plath, to Nikki's mom, who works too late and is away too often to help her youngest daughter heal. In her nostalgic and gritty debut, Darling mashes up autofiction and slam poetry to explore the borderland between teenagers and adults, between family and heritage. Nikki is, after all, "not just...half-Mexican, but the wrong kind of Mexican." Not everything Darling experiments with here works. At times, the poetic vignettes feel out of place, disconnected from both the narrative and the narrative voice. And when we finally learn the root of Nikki's depression, it's hard to understand why a simple plot point would have been kept from us for so long. Even so, Darling's story is poignant, and she conjures 1990s Los Angeles in all its grim and shimmering glory.Part punk zine, part battle cry, this debut wields teen angst and riot grrrl rage like a spiked dog collar or a fist.

Darling brings 1990s Los Angeles to high-octane life in her debut, a whirlwind of burgeoning sexuality, drug use, and self-actualization. The novel opens with Nikki Darling arriving to commotion at her private arts high school-she watches her classmate Claire Chang get wheeled out on a stretcher after being caught cutting herself during class. Witnessing this situation only seems to confirm Nikki-s already ambivalent feelings toward school, where she-s on probation due to spotty attendance. Her divorced parents are too absent to provide any guidance-her mother is busy with work as well as with Nikki-s faraway sister-s abusive relationship, and her father is emotionally unavailable. Without any restrictions or responsibilities, Nikki spends her time cutting class; getting high with her friends; crushing on the beautiful Mike, who likes men; and ruminating on her virginity with the gorgeous and promiscuous Dan. Underneath all this pointed aimlessness is the anxious thrum and veiled violence that accompanies the transition from adolescence to adulthood, especially for young women. Though the book falters from the disconnectedness between scenes, the cultural references, sharp teenage dialogue, and astute observations will transport readers back to their own teenage years, whether those took place during the -90s or not, making this an electric novel. (Nov.)