The Wonder Bread Summer by Jessica Anya Blau

Published by Harper Perennial on May 28, 2013 

The Wonder Bread Summer is a light, amusing coming-of-age story set in the 1980s. Jessica Anya Blau's lean, breezy writing style makes the novel a quick and pleasant read, one that produces smiles and occasional outright laughter.

The child of a black-skinned, mixed race father and a half-Chinese mother, Allie is an unlikely redhead. She's had bad luck with parents (her mother left her to become the tambourine girl in a band, her father cares only about his restaurant) and with her only boyfriend (who borrowed her tuition money before breaking up with her). She has the insecurities that come from being twenty and not yet comfortable with her body or sure of her identity. Escaping from an obnoxious employer who has designs on her relative innocence and no intent to pay the wages he owes her (and whose side business is dealing drugs), Allie impulsively snatches his stash of cocaine on her way out the door.

So begins Allie's adventure in the unsheltered world, a series of mishaps that include a reunion with her mother's band, a date with a pornographer in a wheelchair (the story's only faltering step), and a happy encounter with Billy Idol. In the course of a relatively short time, she loses an old friend, gains new friends, rediscovers her dysfunctional parents, is amazed at the number of men she meets who want to show her their reproductive organs, and learns how difficult it is to hang onto a Wonder Bread bag full of uncut cocaine.

Allie has a knack for doing things that make her feel ashamed. It's an endearing quality. The theme here isn't so much "good girl turns bad" (as in Thelma & Louise) as it is "good girl makes inexplicably bad decisions." The story is barely believable but this is a comedy and a comedy doesn't need to be believable as long as it's funny. The story builds comic momentum as it zips along; the second half is much funnier than the first.

The protagonist in a coming-of-age novel generally discovers something about life. Allie should learn that life is better if you stop feeling sorry for yourself and clean up your own messes, but the novel's real lesson might be: revenge is sweet. It isn't a deep message, but it's satisfying. The same can be said for the novel as a whole.

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