Author(s): Jessica Anya Blau

Fiction

It's 1983 in Berkeley, California. Cut loose by her parents, 20-year old Allie Dodgson is trying hard to make it on her own, attending college on a scholarship and working in a dress shop. But when the dress shop turns out to be a front for a dangerous drug dealing business and Allie ends up with a Wonder Bread bag full of cocaine, her studious life takes a turn for the wild. With a hit man named Vice-Versa in hot pursuit, Allie jumps into her best friend's brand-new Prelude and goes on the lam. In Los Angeles, she finds herself entangled with a duplicitous surfer, a paraplegic porn producer and his Mexican driver, a mean girl from high school, and a legendary rock star. The only people she trusts to pull her out of this jam are the two she can't find: her free-spirited mother, who ran off to be the tambourine girl in a band when Allie was 8; and her father, who moves so often Allie doesn't even have his phone number. Think '80s Alice in Wonderland with a Pineapple Express twist and you get the energy, freshness and wicked black humor of The Wonder Bread Summer.