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Book Review: Gothic Lolita
Apr. 9th, 2010 09:03 pmDakota Lane's Gothic Lolita: A Mystical Thriller shouldn't work. First, it's told in alternating first person, by Chelsea who lives in LA and Miya who lives in Japan... who have essentially the same voice for the first hundred pages. They met through their blogs, which have comments disabled - which have entries generally one or two sentences long - and Chelsea hasn't posted for three years - but no matter, they totally understand each other and have a deep mystical connection.
The whole story (as the subtitle suggests) depends of this fuzzy free-floating mysticism. It's never quite strong enough to make the book fantasy or even magical realism - but it's too strong not to induce eye-rolls in a realistic fiction book.
And finally: nothing is capitalized. A couple of Amazon reviewers defend this on the grounds that "Sixteen-year-olds don't capitalize." First: really? Second, if we're arguing from verisimilitude, is the average sixteen-year-old's impeccably uncapitalized prose usually so lovely and elliptical? (Of course, Miya and Chelsea aren't normal sixteen-year-olds. Book characters so rarely are.)
But all of this is missing the point. Gothic Lolita works by creating an atmosphere: dreamy, sensual (although only rarely, obliquely, and generally creepily sexual), dripping with emotion. Dark. Not dark in the sense of depressing or grimly realistic, but dark in the sense of frightening, seductive, lonely, beautiful. What all this means - if it means anything - is elusive; but all imbued with such intensity, that you feel it must mean something.
It's an adolescent atmosphere: life is beautiful, terrifying, intoxicating, make it stop, speed it up, entirely too much. Or perhaps an artistic atmosphere? The story is set in our world, but it isn't the world that most of us know; but that's what makes it lovely.
It's a deeply flawed book. But it's interesting and, if a vague non-linear dream-logic sort of story line sounds like your thing, worth reading.
The whole story (as the subtitle suggests) depends of this fuzzy free-floating mysticism. It's never quite strong enough to make the book fantasy or even magical realism - but it's too strong not to induce eye-rolls in a realistic fiction book.
And finally: nothing is capitalized. A couple of Amazon reviewers defend this on the grounds that "Sixteen-year-olds don't capitalize." First: really? Second, if we're arguing from verisimilitude, is the average sixteen-year-old's impeccably uncapitalized prose usually so lovely and elliptical? (Of course, Miya and Chelsea aren't normal sixteen-year-olds. Book characters so rarely are.)
But all of this is missing the point. Gothic Lolita works by creating an atmosphere: dreamy, sensual (although only rarely, obliquely, and generally creepily sexual), dripping with emotion. Dark. Not dark in the sense of depressing or grimly realistic, but dark in the sense of frightening, seductive, lonely, beautiful. What all this means - if it means anything - is elusive; but all imbued with such intensity, that you feel it must mean something.
It's an adolescent atmosphere: life is beautiful, terrifying, intoxicating, make it stop, speed it up, entirely too much. Or perhaps an artistic atmosphere? The story is set in our world, but it isn't the world that most of us know; but that's what makes it lovely.
It's a deeply flawed book. But it's interesting and, if a vague non-linear dream-logic sort of story line sounds like your thing, worth reading.
