Orange Eats the Creeps by Grace Krilanovich

I’m so pissed.  I was really looking forward to this book.  I thought it was going to be the kind of experimental, slap in the face novel that would forever leave me shaken and wanting more.   Instead I was bored and frustrated by a very gifted writer more interested in rambling on with strong images and poetic details than giving me even a nugget of a story.  I get it.   Books don’t have to be plot centric but they should be coherent.  What is this book about?  It’s about a foster teenage girl in search for her sister in the Pacific northwest.   She hooks up  with a bunch of vagrant teenage junkies (vampires?) and that’s about as much as I got before it became redundant and annoying to keep reading.  I did finish it; I’m proud of that.  I could have and wanted to stop after the first third of the book, but I kept on, taking my time, reading each sentence carefully, hoping for meaning, scrambling for a metaphor, trying to convince myself that I was just not smart enough, that there had to be something there.  Maybe there is, but I couldn’t find it.  Some passages were very powerful in a “look-at-how-amazing-a-writer-I-am” way.   But I never understood who these characters were, I never became emotionally concerned for them, or witnessed some transformation that moved me or got me to think outside my point of view.  Basically I wasted my time.  I hate being so harsh and I actually like the idea of challenging the reader and redefining what a novel can be or should be.   Yet in the end the writer  must keep me engaged and here Krilanovich failed.  Grade: C