cover image Polly

Polly

Amy Bryant, . . Harper Perennial, $13.95 (254pp) ISBN 978-0-06-089804-5

The boy-crazy heroine of Bryant's debut novel, Polly Clarke, is in junior high, lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., hangs out at the roller rink and dreams of being on the drill team. But alienated by her home life—her parents are divorced, her father's an alcoholic and her stepfather's unloving—and by conformist pressures at school, she quits the drill team, trades her pastel sweaters for Megadeth T-shirts and takes up smoking. She becomes a devotee of the D.C. hardcore punk scene and has a string of dressed-in-black boyfriends, some sweet, some sleazy, some criminal. As she drinks and smokes her way through high school, she experiments with drugs, and during her first year in college is raped by an acquaintance while drunk. Afterward, she re-examines her self-destructive behavior and finds redemption in art, which becomes her college major. Though instructive and sometimes funny to anyone who remembers the degradations of high school, Bryant's novel, with its threadbare prose and angsty teenage narrator, reads like young adult fiction. (Jan.)