Listen to Maya, the likable narrator of Jade Sharma's righteous first novel, Problems: "This is life: You walk down this path and people join you. Then they leave, and you're alone again, and you keep replacing them. Then these people leave too." Maya's got problems in spades. Her alcoholic husband leaves her. Her older lover breaks off their affair. Living on peach yogurt, cigarettes and fudge brownie ice cream, she works part time when she has to and fantasizes about life with a child: "Facebook with baby pictures, my hair in a baseball cap, complain about how tired I was." But mostly, she's a junkie--blissed out, strung out, turning Craigslist tricks for cash to score another bundle, trying to taper off with a recovering friend's Xanax and Suboxone, and knowing well that "this powder people snort or shoot... makes them feel good, but they end up turning into zombies, lying around, wasting their lives, getting older, and doing nothing."
An MFA graduate of New York's New School, Sharma knows the city with its home-delivery drug dealers and its impossible costs, where "you work fifty million hours a week just to sleep in a room where only a bed fits." She knows addiction: "You have to be tough to be a drug addict. You have to sit there a lot of the time and be sick." And she knows Maya, her voice by turns raunchy, clever, spunky, sage, funny and forlorn as she barrels through the vicissitudes of a life of addiction grasping for an escape hatch--such a fresh voice that we can't help but hope she finds one. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.