“Amra Brooks' novella California is ostensibly about the 1980s, too, and it's quick and occasionally engrossing, reminiscent of the good, sharp zine writing I grew up on. Brooks' narrator--shuttling up and down the California coast with her eccentric, erratic, separated parents--recounts the 80s and early 90s as a stream of halting, disjointed, cleanly-rendered episodes. A moment from "Aptos, 1986"--maybe something someone said at school, or a particularly desperate look on her mother's face--proceeds into "Santa Monica, 1989," with its completely different sets of neighbors and friends. What I like is that it stops just short of full-on confession: although it's written retrospectively, the moments are fairly self contained, free of the kind of foreboding self-awareness one rarely possesses at the age of 14. It is the 80s in Brooks' California, but you can only really infer this based on the world around her. Casual sex, just before the panic of AIDS. Drugs, but after the rosy hedonism of the 60s. Guys in bands, as a tentative DIY/indie scene forms beneath their feet. Parents struggling to accept that the 60s did not work.” - Hua Hsu, The Atlantic.
