num_pages: 256
description: With his vivid stylized prose cyberpunk intensity and seemingly limitless imagination Jack Womack has been compared to both William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut - though Gibson admits If you dropped the characters from Neuromancer into Womack's Manhattan they'd fall down screaming and have nervous breakdowns. Random Acts of Senseless Violence Womack's fifth novel is a thrilling hysterical and eerily disturbing piece ot work. Lola Hart is an ordinary twelve-year-old girl. She comes from a comfortable family attends an exclusive private school loves her friends Lori and Katherine teases her sister Boob. But in the increasingly troubled city where she lives (a near-future Manhattan) she is a dying breed. Riots fire TB outbreaks roaming gangs increasing inflation political and civil unrest all threaten her way of life as well as the very fabric of New York City. In her diary Lola chronicles the changes she and her family make as they attempt to adjust to a city and a country that is spinning out of control. Her mother is a teacher but no one is hiring. Her father is a writer but no one is buying his scripts. Hounded by creditors and forced to vacate their apartment and move to Harlem her family and her life begins to dissolve. Increasingly estranged from her privileged school friends Lola soon makes new ones: Iz Jude and Weezie - wise veterans of the street who know what must be done in order to survive and are more than willing to do it. And the metamorphosis of Lola Hart who is surrounded by the new language and violence of the streets begins. Simultaneously chilling and darkly hilarious Random Acts of Senseless Violence takes the jittery urban fears we suppress both in fiction and in daily life and makes them explicit - and explicitly terrifying.--Publisher/Powells.com
language: English
title: Random Acts of Senseless Violence
publisher: Grove Press