THE EXENE CHRONICLES
by Camille
A. Collins
GENRE: Vintage
Young Adult / Multi-culture
BLURB:
Camille A. Collins's lyrical debut novel speaks to the passionate
engagement of adolescent girls—with music, with injustice, with love, with
life. This is a courageous coming-of-age story, one that poet Nikki Giovanni
recommends "sharing with our teenage sons and daughters."
Collins's 1980s southern California set novel is a literary debut
that tackles social inequality with poetic riffs and heart-pounding angst.
Excerpt:
With the endless choices of the Salvation
Army thrift store came the opportunity to take on whatever costume, and with
it, whichever fantasy role they chose. Much like their descendant courtship
with melancholy, their love of the clothes and hairstyles of the late 1950s and
early ’60s was not grounded in reality, but in the promise of some Shangri-la
where girls beguiled with hooded eyelids and teased hair, the glimmer of pale,
iridescent gloss on full lips.
“Lia! You’ve got to see what I found
for you!”
Ryan gave up waiting and raced to
the back of the store, where Lia was admiring jewel-encrusted pocketbooks, and
grabbed her by the hand. In a row of old frocks, some of them musty and
stained, others absurd in their grandiose embellishment of floor- length
drapery, puffed sleeve, and sequin, Ryan had discovered a jewel.
“Stand still now.” Taking her by the
shoulders, Ryan made Lia stand tall and straight while she held the sleeveless,
pink satin, ’60s-style dress up to Lia’s small frame.
Stepping in front of a mirror with
the dress draped against her body, Lia cried, “Oh my god. I love it! I can’t
believe how rad you are!” She threw her arms around Ryan’s neck.
“It’ll be your Supremes dress,” Ryan
decided.
Ryan wasn’t as lucky in finding
anything special at the thrift shop that day. To strike out at the Salvation
Army was one thing, but at the drugstore there was never any shortage of items
for consolation. With exactly $8.37 worth of merchandise between them, the
girls were delighted by the prospect of getting back home where, imprisoned
inside their still girlishly furnished bedrooms turned out in fluffy white
comforters and stuffed unicorns, which they clung to during witching hours,
when they dreamt of being spirited away by those creatures come to life, they
would work up their sadness like warm palms dredging up the dark forces of a
Ouija Board.
As they clambered onto the bus that
would take them back to their serene pocket of suburbia, the two girls clasped
hands.
“I love you!” Lia squealed. “You’re
my best friend in the entire world!”
“You’re mine too!” Ryan cried.
If spilling peroxide on the pale
green bathroom rug, which caused a spreading white stain and made Ryan’s mom
yell at the girls, wasn’t foreshadowing—a telling clue that all that conjuring
had been unnecessary— then Ryan’s cocky attitude once the peroxide took hold,
and she showed up to school the next day tossing her long blond hair all over
the place, should have been. “Coming over after school?” Lia leaned over to whisper
as they prepped for a science lab.
Ryan shook her head. “Elizabeth
Cole’s sneaking boys over while her mom’s out. I’d invite you, but you don’t
drink, don’t make out…” Ryan flung her hair off her shoulder and abruptly
turned away.
Ryan’s introduction to Neil Jimenez
two weeks later wasn’t exactly the dream prescribed by the clutching of those
unicorns, or their infant attachment to Baudelaire’s feverish lamentations;
neither was the fact that Lia would end up donning her pretty pink “Supremes”
dress on the loneliest day of her life.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Camille A. Collins has an MFA in
Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been
the recipient of the Short Fiction Prize from the South Carolina Arts
Commission, and her writing has appeared in The African-American National
Biography, published by Harvard University and Oxford University Press; in The
Twisted Vine, a literary journal of Western New Mexico University, and other
places.
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