Bouzi

The heady 21-year-old narrator who gives her nickname to this effusive first novel sounds like she's in love with the modern world, and more in love with her sometime boyfriend, the full-time bohemian slacker Jesse Costco. Bouzi retraces her ""mad dreams,"" her infatuation with Jesse and their perilous antics across the streets, playgrounds and ratty apartments of a nameless small American city (which resembles Portland, Ore., where the author makes her home). Bouzi meets Jesse; they fall for each other; they spend charmed days together. Days become weeks--then it ends. The love story exhibits all the momentum a reader could wish (though its final events could have used some editing). But the experiences of Bouzi, Jesse and friends serve mostly as a frame for Robin's fanzine-like and rhapsodic prose. Trying hard to sound hip and poetic, and often succeeding, Robin combines Gen-X verisimilitude with a slangy, near-hallucinatory, sentence-by-sentence idiosyncrasy. Her writing can be amateurish, but more often it's offbeat and quite vivid. The best of Robin's enraptured paragraphs render this short narrative distant kin to the work of Elizabeth Smart, or to Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which Jesse and Bouzi invoke. Like those authors, and despite rough patches, Robin combines real literary power with appeal to teen readers, who may see beyond the well-placed props of a generation--the secondhand skates, the junk food, the clothes in piles--and thoroughly enjoy this odd debut. (July)