(Reviewed by JD Jung)
#CommissionsEarned
“Punk rock is pure, it stands for nothing.”
It’s the early 2000’s and sixteen-year-old Kat feels that punk rock was intrinsically made for her. She desperately wants to be accepted by the punk crowd in her hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
The daughter of Eastern European immigrants, her mother saw her future at Winston-Salem Music School. Kat hated school but thought it as a chance to get away.
She really didn’t fit into the crowd and was considered a “poseur”. “You wanna be in the world, you gotta be hard-core.” However, this all changed by a chance encounter with her favorite artist. Then her reputation skyrocketed though it was built on lies. Now that she was accepted, will she be willing to give up her future and old friends to enter a world of lying, skipping class, shoplifting and drugs?
Yes, there are a lot of coming-of-age stories out there, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one. The author digs deep into not only the protagonist, but also into the supporting characters, and it kept me wondering what would happen to each of them. Unfortunately, she only scratches the surface of how Kat’s life was affected by her parents’ Eastern European experience and wished she would have delved deeper into that.
Still, A Cigarette Lit Backwards is sometimes funny, but always dark with a realness that the reader will feel.
