Michelle Bailat-Jones

This week at Necessary Fiction, I had the pleasure of reviewing Nina-Marie Gardner’s début novel, Sherry & Narcotics:

It isn’t easy to publish a love story these days—somehow we’ve all decided this is the stuff of cliché. As if the back and forth success and failure of looking for love doesn’t concern most people most of the time. Which is why Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics stands out in its genre of contemporary urban fiction. Here is a novel whose central movement is fixedly concerned with a young woman and a young man and whether or not the two will find a way to be together. (…)

There’s an argument to be made for Sherry & Narcotics as a coming-of-age novel for Generation X.  Mary is very much a member of that tribe—financially and geographically independent, at ease in the greater world, with more choices and possible connections than any of the previous generations, and yet, true to the Generation X crisis, slow to negotiate her way to emotional adulthood and at risk to the dangers of her precious independence.

Read the full review here.