Do You like book Random Acts Of Senseless Violence (1995)?
So tough to rate.1) Exquisite writing. Mind-blowingly marvelous. The shifting voice of the MC is compelling and utterly believable.I've penned myself dry with all I writ. You give ear when everybody deafs and lend me shoulder constant if tears need dropping.2)The book kept me up ALL NIGHT. I was unable to stop reading because I had to find out about Iz and Boob and Lola.3) At the same time, I hated the plot. I'm not saying it was a bad plot. It was gripping and perfectly structured. It's no mean feat to give the reader five assassinated presidents in a year and yet feel realistic. But I felt constantly nauseated and on the verge of tears (which frequently spilled over). When I finished I had to speak rather strongly to myself because that everpresent siren call of oblivion was considerably louder than usual.I'm giving it one star because I genuinely wish I hadn't read it, and the world seems vastly bleaker today. This doesn't mean it is a bad book. It's a brilliant book, that bewitched me, and made me hate it.
—Emma Sea
This book should be as famous as A Clockwork Orange - like that one it has its own language and pictures a near future urban nightmare featuring gangs of feral children.But it isn't. Perhaps the problem is the title, which is, when you look at it objectively, completely crap. Perhaps the problem is that when people see that it's about a near future urban nightmare featuring gangs of feral children they think huh, I already read one like that.Doesn't stop them reading umpteen books about vampires though. So it can't be that. Maybe it’s because this novel is a little bit science fictiony and a little bit young adulty and that confuses us poor readers. But really I don’t know. It's a mystery.Anyway, this novel portrays the disintegration of our heroine's privileged upper-class Manhattan lifestyle bit by bit as all the problems inherent in the rich Western lifestyle which makes it doomed, doomed I say, irredeemably doomed rise up like a fetid sewerey sea of unfixable breakdown and commences to drown everyone. So this is a lot of fun, seeing the rich suffer and the stuck-up girls not able to ride their ponies in the Berkshires any more because the ponies all got eaten. But that's not the half of it.The tale is told in diary form by Lola Hart who is 12 when we begin and going on 14 I think as we leave her. It’s one thing to have a good laugh at the rich suffering but when you’re up close and personal with a 12 year old girl’s diary while her life is torn down bit by bit and you watch her have to rebuild it herself with her bare hands, that’s another thing entirely. Jack Womack is a very brave writer – he thinks he can think the way a rich funny intelligent 12 year old girl would, about 20 or 30 years in the future, and show us how her whole mental landscape, and consequently her vocabulary, her idioms and slang and grammar, all morph along with these huge life changes and she becomes absorbed into the black street gangs which rule the blocks where her suddenly impoverished family has to move to. By the end of the book you get to be as fluent in future black street vernacular as Lola has to be.By half way, you get the sinking feeling you know how thinks will turn out for Lola, so by the last third you are reading through your fingers hoping that you’re gonna be wrong. The last page is a killer. I can't say this about many people but I can say - Lola Hart – you broke my heart..
—Paul Bryant
Recommended on YALSA-BK as a good dystopian title starring a 12-year-old girl.Random Acts is the story of a young girl in a near-future Manhattan dealing with an increasingly violent culture. Over the course of about six months, Lola's life falls from upper-middle class life into violent crime and life on the streets. The novel watches her life, instincts, and language change. Of particular note is this language thing. The first entries are in traditional conservative modern grammer. By the end, you get portions like:"You give ear when everybody deafs and lend me shoulder constant if tears need dropping. I know you're always with me but time shorts and I have to solo present. Deathpeace still be an undone deal but I set now ready when it come whenever it come." (pg. 255)The author transitions the prose extremely smoothly. I didn't even notice that things were changing until I realized that I was occasionally struggling to see meaning in the text. Honestly, I can see why it didn't find an audience. It's about a 12-year-old, but it's pretty darn gritty, with heavy violence, lesbian (though not at all graphic) sex, and a thoroughly depressing ending. I'm not sure who I would handsell this to other than other adult dystopian nerds like me. Probably gonna give it to my resident lesbian goth upper teen, with a soft "let me know what you think" hedge. But I really did like it.
—Raina
