Sleep Before Evening
Sleep Before Evening
Sleep Before Evening
Marianne is teetering at the edge of reason. A death in the family sends her brilliant academic career and promising future spiraling out of control until resentment towards those who shaped her past leads her on a wild and desperate search for the truth about herself. On the seedy side of New York, she meets Miles, a hip musician busking the streets and playing low-rent venues in a muddled bid to make his own dreams come true. In her new life, she finds anarchic squalor, home grown music and poetry, booze, drugs, sex, violence, love, loss, and, above all, exhilarating freedom on her troubled journey from sleep to awakening. This gritty, relentless story unfolds with the same cool detachment that motivates the central character to peel back the layers of her life and expose the painful scalding within. Finalist in the Regional Fiction category of the 2008 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. "...as the drama coils tighter and tighter, it is the exquisite quality of writing that keeps the reader utterly glued. As Marianne struggles with her demons and we almost hold our breath as she nears her eighteenth birthday, Magdalena Ball's Sleep Before Evening shows us that in order to find yourself, you sometimes have to lose yourself first." Cathy Biribauer, The Rose and Thorn

Book Details

Genre: 

  • Fiction

Age Level: 

  • Mature Young Adult

Reviewed by Flamingnet Student Book Reviewer SMill - Marianne Cotton is a straight A student. Her loving grandfather provides the constant support of a caring father figure while her bipolar mother flaunts around the country chasing her dream of becoming a successful artist. But when her grandfather dies of an unexpected stroke and her mother's marriage falls apart, Marianne finds her stunning academic career unraveling and her prosperous future darkening. Marianne meets an exotic street music performer, Miles, who introduces her to the lures of the lower east side.

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