This choppy, loosely autobiographical chronicle of the nomadic life of a troubled Eastern European teen is a rather circumscribed, inward-looking follow-up to Radojcic's acclaimed 2002 debut, Homecoming
. When 14-year-old Sasha gets into a fight in school and runs away, her mother insists they move from Yugoslavia to Cuba to live with her ambassador uncle. But Cuba is even more alienating than home. While her mother is busy attending state functions with Fidel Castro, Sasha, who has already been molested by a cousin, has an affair with a poor black man, scandalizing her hosts and neighbors. Branded a slut and a troublemaker, Sasha is then shuttled among family households and eventually sent to Greece to live with her indifferent father and his favorite son. She amuses herself by partying with her American schoolmates and soldiers, falls in love with a married man and picks up a drug habit. Finally, she makes her way to New York City where, after making another series of bad decisions, she is forced to confront her painful past. Flat, erratic writing mirrors Sasha's studied affectlessness perhaps too faithfully, and the story, built from a collection of scenes rather than a single linear narrative, often lacks direction. Sasha's disorienting, thoroughly contemporary international upbringing gives her self-destructive behavior an added edge of interest, but her exploits come to seem more perfunctory than shocking. Agent, Emilie Stewart at the Anne Edelstein Literary Agency. (Apr. 5)
