Ballads of Suburbia by Stephanie Kuehnert is a good and swift read and reminiscent of many a coming-of-age story, perhaps most notably of which is Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned. But that may be a bit of a poetic comparison. As it turns out the author openly admits to being inspired by Meno, who was once her college fiction writing professor. In fact, it was because he played some Johnny Cash ballads in class to illustrate how a story is told through song that Kuehnert essentially wrote this second novel. (Her first is entitled I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. I looked for this but it was not available in store so I picked up this book instead.) Initially I bought this book because I enjoy coming across novels written by authors of my Alma mater, Columbia College Chicago, where I also studied Fiction Writing–I was never quite able to get into Meno’s class as those seats where in demand and filled up fast!–but it also sounded very interesting and I love coming-of-age stories so I decided to give it a go. A description:

There are so many ballads. Achy breaky country songs. Mournful pop songs. Then there’s the rare punk ballad, the ballad of suburbia: louder, faster, angrier . . . till it drowns out the silence.

Kara hasn’t been back to Oak Park since the end of junior year, when a heroin overdose nearly killed her and sirens heralded her exit. Four years later, she returns to face the music. Her life changed forever back in high school: her family disintegrated, she ran around with a whole new crowd of friends, she partied a little too hard, and she fell in love with gorgeous bad boy Adrian, who left her to die that day in Scoville Park. . . .

Amidst the music, the booze, the drugs, and the drama, her friends filled a notebook with heartbreakingly honest confessions of the moments that defined and shattered their young lives. Now, finally, Kara is ready to write her own.

Ballads of Suburbia is a highly identifiable book for me. In several ways. [1] It takes place where I spent my adolescence. The town of Oak Park, IL is very close to me and the author even uses places I am familiar with, such the Fireside Bowl (which was a place where punk shows were put on), the World Music Theater (which since has changed to Tweeter Center then the First Midwest Bank Amphitheater–thanks for that stupid name and fuck you, corporate America) and “Punk Rock Denny’s” (which is familiar to me because I worked for years at another Denny’s and that one often came into conversation.) [2] The characters in the book are very much like the kind of friends I had. That was my scene. Those were my friends. The punks, the skaters, the stoners, the metalheads (and even a few hippies too.) [3] More than anything this novel is an examination of the suburban teenage drug culture, a subject I am quite tuned into.

Overall, a thumbs up. Kara is a clearly defined protagonist and a relate-able one as well. She suffers from an extreme case of the teenage condition, if you know what I mean. She is wounded and pained and filled with that oh-so-ubiquitous teenage angst that fills books and diaries and journals across the globe. She’s a cutter. She slices into her skin and uses that release of numbness it gives her as a coping mechanism to deal with family problems and friend and boy drama. (I don’t mean to make her form of medication seem trite or illogical, it’s just that even after having read the book, I still don’t understand the phenomena behind cutting. Perhaps that is meant only for those who have done it to truly comprehend.)

Eventually Kara’s search for catharsis leads her into a dangerous path toward drug addiction. And she’s not the only one. Characters in this novel latch on to various substances: alcohol, pot, acid, heroin, crystal meth, ecstacy. And these drug habits are represented in a rather true to life way. From the mother who smokes pot with her daughter to the boyfriend that doesn’t try hard enough to stop his girl from using heroin, even though he claims he wishes for her not to. The only time the drug use seemed a bit exaggerated to me was with one character who dropped acid consistently for a very long time. Like a week or two. That’s a long time to be tripping. Though for the character, acid was a way of calming her and issuing her equilibrium. I can understand that to an extent; I–no matter what drugs, or alcohol for that matter, I was on–was always able to maintain a collected-ness about myself. I always had my feet planted in reality. And I promise you, while using any kind of hallucinogen albeit, acid, mescalin, mushrooms, or otherwise, you gotta be able to identify reality while you’re high. That’s why people have “bad trips” and freak-outs. So how this girl was able to be under acid’s influence for so long and still behave and function normally makes little sense to me. Plus, acid makes you lively and awake. It’s difficult to sleep. And when the drug starts to fade there is the “come down” period that has the possibility to destroy you and burn you into into depression until the effects dissipate. It’s odd to me–and those who aren’t familiar with drugs may not understand–that Kara has a fear of dropping of acid yet has no qualms about snorting heroin. For me, heroin was the invisible line I would not cross. It scared me, especially seeing how it affected other people and the problems and habits it formed in them. Anyway, that is clearly way more than anyone cares to read about my youth experiences with drugs.

So, in short, a good book. And it makes me curious to read her debut novel.