Los Angeles, 1982. Eighteen-year-old Jude, newly out of reform school, is searching for her best friend, Winnie, when she falls under the spell of an older man with a motorcycle, a needle, and a taste for danger. What begins as an escape spirals into motel rooms, stickups, and drug binges. Jude eventually finds Winnie, now Velvet, dancing at a Sunset Strip club. Together they imagine a future—bartending, writing, building a life of their own—but the same world that offers glamour and freedom threatens to consume them.
Rowbottom’s sophomore outing offers a powerful, vivid, visceral look at the heyday of the adult film industry from the perspectives of the women who populated it.
This unctuous tale of liberation, the performance of sex, and friendship told against the neon facade of 1980’s Los Angeles has just the right amount of grime and the right amount of heart.
An intimate and kinetic tale of friendship and betrayal in the 1980s Los Angeles porn world ... Rowbottom’s portrayal of the porn demimonde is exciting and gritty without feeling lurid, and the novel doubles as a moving ode to the value of a female friendship. It’s a knockout.
