Odette Larson vividly recounts her adolescence on the edge of Las Vegas before it became the Disneyfied centre of family entertainment that it is today. She and her brothers would ride together on Odette’s horse through the desert, reveling in the frontiers of this haunted geography, discovering the expanses that liberated them from the severity of their lives at home. There they would meet up with various characters—African-American cowboys, lascivious truckers, teenage runaways—smoke as many joints as they could get their hands on, and avoid the restrictions of parents who ruled with an iron fist and a community that treated them as outcasts. When Odette continued to rebel, she was sent to a mental hospital called Sparks, from which she made a spectacular escape with two convicted killers. These men were soon caught, leaving the twelve-year-old Odette alone on the streets of Oakland. Encounters with various men—one who enslaved her, one who liberated her, one who loved her—form the denouement to this extraordinary rite of passage.

As if Boxcar Bertha met Dorothy Allison, Odette Larson reveals the underbelly of American life in the '50s and '60s: the cruel poverty of a “white trash” community; the prevalence of sexual and physical abuse of children; the ravages of heroin on the Black community in Oakland. In this magnificent debut, Larson tells her story in unsparing detail, conveying the brutality of an early life with passion and unquenchable optimism.

“I like the thudding sound of Flying Sparks. It's a book written with a consciousness of class, of place (the desert) and being girl in a shifting world instead of inside your head. I like that it breaks out and stays out.” – Eileen Myles, author of Cool for You and Chelsea Girls

Odette Larson lives in Northern California.
Publication
Cloth: July 2001
Paper: June 2002

192 pages

Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 606 3
£15 / US$23 / CAN$34

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 415 1
£9 / US$13 / CAN$19