Product Description

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215237 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Amazon.com
You don't have to be part of the emerging postpunk subculture of queer urban girls to relish this smooth ride of a novel, like Kathy Acker on Prozac on a sunny day, in which many exciting things happen without affecting much of anything, and one of the most profound moments is a mild, drug-induced insight into the meaninglessness of life. Michelle, the main character, is a person for whom blue hair is as big a style change as blue pants. She lurches between women, more in love with the idea of love than with Iris or Willa or Gwynne or Petra. Her work experiences are equally brief, although she can't bring herself to actually quit jobs. She just stops showing up. "Are you going to work?" her current lover asks one morning.

No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work. Willa didn't work. I mean, she did, but it's a stretch to call it work. She bartended at a dyke bar a few nights a week, drank free beer, and bummed all her cigarettes.... All week she was free, writing angsty brilliant poems, drawing comic books, painting gigantic painful pictures, you know, living. I wanted to live.

Michelle Tea's characters are a peculiar fin-de-siècle blend of jaded idealists and thoughtful egotists: sex workers, poets, and mad hatters who end up making breakfast for roomfuls of stoned strangers. The occasional flash of clarity doesn't alter the basically anarchic nature of Tea's meandering narrative, so much like the tales of an incidental figure from Valencia, a loud redhead named Iggy who told stories "so incredible you wondered if they were true but ultimately didn't care because you were so enraptured by her grand gestures and re-enactments." --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
Tea, a modern-day Beat, is also a kind of pop ambassador to the world of the tattooed, pierced, politicized and sex-radical queer-grrls of San Francisco. Her second novel (after The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America) dramatizes the hopes and hurts, apathies and ambitions of young lesbians looking for love in the Mission District, focusing on Michelle, a poet navigating the druggy, boozy dyke scene while consorting with a series of wacky lady loves. Among these are Petra, who thrills Michelle by brandishing a knife and being bossy in bed; Willa, a depressive who won't take off her clothes even in the heat of passion; Iris, originally from Georgia; and Scrumptious, who Michelle falls for before she realizes she's the type of girl who wears corny "freedom rings" and white jeans. While the trivialities of these courtships are entertaining and the book is far more coherent than the author's first novel, Tea hasn't entirely figured out how to make her characters come to life beyond predictable bounds. Organized as a series of loosely linked character profiles, the book self-consciously relies on the hipster grooviness and inside jokes of S.F. culture to energize the narrative. And although Tea's writing is consistently uncommon and textured -- "the mushrooms tasted like a trunk of moth-eaten clothes and after we ate them we went out to the stoop and waited for the world to turn weird"--folks waiting for the truly weird, breakthrough novel in downtown alt-chick literature will be disappointed by this sometimes-superficial, stylized entry. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The eponymous lesbian heroine of Tea's Valencia lives in a dirty San Franciscan haze of cigarettes, cheap beer, hip fashion, and girlfriend after girlfriend. As she moves from one confused affair to the next, she drifts from job to job and passion to passion. In this continuation of Tea's The Passionate Mistakes and the Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America (Semiotext(e), 1999), the twentysomething characters desperately search for love and usually find only an unrequited crush or hollow sex. There's no real plot here, but there is immediacy in the stream-of-consciousness style, as if Tea were in the room offering the reader a late-night confession. Recommended for those seeking a glimpse into the angst of a dramatically self-absorbed if ultimately aimless youth culture.
-Devon C. Thomas, Hass Assocs., Ann Arbor, MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

Gossip girl
This book was first published in 2000, but the reason for this review is that it is soon to be released (in Australia), in paperback and with a new introduction by the author. In some ways, the intro is the best part, as Tea obviously has a longer perspective now. Maybe she has also grown a sense of humour about herself - the best part of the intro is when she takes a certain glee in the news of one of her hate objects in the book, after hearing a Tea poem about her, having 'kicked a bus shelter and broken her foot - because I was a small-hearted, bad person, I delighted in this'.
Unfortunately, there is not much of this duality or humour in the book itself. Tea took herself very seriously, playing the grunged-out lesbian role to the hilt and beyond. She seems to be under the impression that taking a lot of drugs, drinking too much, and having a lot of violent sex with girls is somehow revolutionary. To which the only response (from the perspective of 2008, at least) is: yeah, that's nice, girl, now get in the queue.
To tell the truth, the community she describes seems a rather unpleasant place: incredibly grotty, sexually aggressive to the point of being predatory, riddled with drugs (the bad kind, not the good kind), and built on self-righteous self-indulgence. And the gossip! These people gossip and bitch about each other, like, all the time! It is as if they combine the worst features of teenage girls and adolsecent boys. Tea: ever thought about not so much finding your inner child as finding your inner adult?
So is the book worthless? Actually, not at all. If you can get past Tea's innate self-destructiveness and obsession - her love of love, her desire for desire - there is a good literary sense here. She occasionally writes a killer line, a spot-on description. Having spent some time walking around San Francisco, I accepted the strong sense of place here (even if Tea's world is restricted to a couple of blocks).
But then, Valencia is not for me, middle-aged white guy that I am. So I will give this book to someone I know, someone young and on the verge of becoming exceptional. It might (or might not) mean the world to them.

I feel sick
This book made me feel sick, literally. For that, I credit the author who is truly far gifted than the three stars I award this book. I really wouldn't recommend this book unless one wants to spend the time it takes to read the book in a crystal/speed/meth induced mania. Thumbs up for any and all LGBTQ literature, but thumbs down for the self-aware self-indulgent self-destruction. I guess I've just had enough lately.

Like another great American writer, Michelle Tea reserves all judgments
A lot of folks feel that Michelle Tea's "Valencia" has great prose but lacks substance. The same has been said about another great American novel, "The Great Gatsby" but for all the wrong reasons. The book is focused on two revolutions (not the great and gory kind): a revolution of the heart, and the earth as it goes once around the sun.

There are so many times that the narrator could have judged, but she doesn't. Instead, she goes on about her business in different San Francisco neighborhoods. You won't find the prose to politically empower yourself into freedom. You won't find some Judith Butlerian bracketting and reconfiguring of what is illusorily static into something dynamic. But you will find someone looking at San Francisco sans ideology in a way that's fun and alive!