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storyman's review
4.0
Here’s a book that never let’s up. Selena is a prostitute, enjoys a snort of recreational drugs, and can look after herself. She needs to, because the amount of abuse she suffers is monumental and graphic. If you’re Squamish, you better move on.
It starts with an opportunistic theft of a one night stand’s cash and dodgy CD. The CD turns out to be data, and it’s wanted. Here comes Selena’s first beating and rape. She’s so badly turned over by the gangsters you’d half-expect her to slink away and lick her wounds, but she’s not like that. She plots revenge, and from there the stakes become higher and higher, until you think she’s done for.
Selena’s a self-professed whore, with little self-esteem, but she will do what she needs to survive. The danger throughout is comic-book, but bone-crunchingly real. Selena herself is fully three-dimensional even if some of her adversaries are not, and I totally enjoyed it. The violence, the rape, the sex is all very graphic, but Selena’s agency powers you all the way through.
It starts with an opportunistic theft of a one night stand’s cash and dodgy CD. The CD turns out to be data, and it’s wanted. Here comes Selena’s first beating and rape. She’s so badly turned over by the gangsters you’d half-expect her to slink away and lick her wounds, but she’s not like that. She plots revenge, and from there the stakes become higher and higher, until you think she’s done for.
Selena’s a self-professed whore, with little self-esteem, but she will do what she needs to survive. The danger throughout is comic-book, but bone-crunchingly real. Selena herself is fully three-dimensional even if some of her adversaries are not, and I totally enjoyed it. The violence, the rape, the sex is all very graphic, but Selena’s agency powers you all the way through.
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