Little Green

A 16-year-old drifter is more concerned with staying alive than with coming-of-age in Stinson's harrowing debut. In 1976, Janie Marek walks into a rural Washington topless bar hoping for food, but gets a job dancing, instead. Soon, though, she's raped by a stranger and then taken in by Stella, the club's bouncer. Meanwhile, she falls in love with Paul Jesse, a motorcycle-riding, drug-dealing bad boy 10 years her senior, who, soon after she moves in with him, turns on her, like nearly everyone in her life. First, he stashes her in a cabin in Northern California as collateral for a San Francisco to Boston drug run. After his return weeks later, he's strung out, vicious, and ever more cruel as his meth addiction worsens, leaving Janie to subsist on little more than dreams of domesticity and the lies Paul tells her—until an eye-opening trip to Eugene, Ore. The milieu of drifters, grifters, dealers, junkies, and other lowlifes is just what you'd expect, but Stinson, thankfully, doesn't allow the narrative to wallow or glorify, and the hope found is hard-won and genuine. (June)