Marian Palaia's debut, The Given World, is a Vietnam War-era road novel, the saga of a young Montana girl's bolt from the family farm for San Francisco, "determined to beat the crappy odds and discover the Pacific" and to find some relief from the loss of her idolized older brother, missing in action somewhere in the tunnels of Cu Chi. Reminiscent of Sissy in Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Palaia's protagonist, Riley, is up for anything. When seriously busted up as young girl from a fall off the farmhouse roof, she gets a taste of morphine, and after Mick goes MIA, parlays that into a 30-year trip of booze and drugs and sex--working odd jobs and living on the streets, in parks, in cars and the occasional co-worker's flop. She fixes broken-down cars, delivers newspapers, bartends at a lesbian bar, shoots pool and beds junkies and abusive losers. Riley's a mess and knows it; but in Palaia's very capable hands, she's a survivor and an admirable mess.
A peripatetic scholar with several degrees, including a University of Wisconsin MFA, Palaia knows the smells and sticky tavern floors of San Francisco's Mission and Castro districts; the desperation of "rockheads searching the sidewalks, picking up anything small and white... something that will make their a**-out lives feel worth living awhile longer"; and "Saigon's incessant din and treacly grime and sleepless lunacy." In Riley, she has created a character who believes in second chances. The Given World is a moving novel of an era that just won't go away. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.