cover image Have You Seen Me?

Have You Seen Me?

Laura Denham. Carroll & Graf Publishers, $12 (245pp) ISBN 978-0-7867-1062-1

""Of course, we're all trying to find ourselves. It's when you have other people looking for you that you know you're really lost,"" muses Juliet, the former stripper, prostitute, speed addict and resident of an ecoterrorist commune at the center of Laura Denham's first novel, Have You Seen Me? After an unconventional but relatively wholesome upbringing by hippie parents in Northern California in the 1980s, the likable, sharply observant Juliet gets swept up in San Francisco's sex industry and is soon awash in drugs and money as her ""career"" spins out of control, and she finally disappears into the commune. Denham has a surprisingly assured, captivating voice. She avoids the pitfalls of this potentially lurid subject matter, offering a thoughtful exploration of the effect of the 1960s counterculture on another generation of lost youth.