Although the protagonist of Girl Walking Backwards is a young, more-or-less "out" lesbian, this not a lesbian novel so much as a classic, post-Catcher in the Rye roman à clef, closely observed and skillfully written. Skye has even fewer illusions than Holden Caulfield, but she manages to be cynical without being world-weary. She signs up for volleyball at her new high school only because the girls on the team are beautiful, then shrinks from making the first move toward them: "Making friends is such a formal thing," she reflects. "It would have been so convenient if we all drank. Puking is great bonding, holding your friend's head over the toilet seat is kind of an intimate act. Puking friends come and go, though, at least that was my experience in junior high." When she catches sight of the doomed, black-clad Jessica, Skye thinks she has found a soulmate, but Jessica turns out to be a murky reflection of Skye's mother--unhappy and unstable, feeling cheated by life. To what extent Skye will be pulled down into others' trouble is the issue beneath the more pressing questions of whom she will love, and who will love her. A first novel of unusual distinction. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
Williams confronts coming-of-age angst in this dry, often angry debut about a 16-year-old lesbian who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., with her skittish mother, a spaced-out New Age divorcee on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Despite her parents' rocky breakup, Skye's world has managed to hang together, if precariously. She volunteers to work for Planned Parenthood because "it was the only organization that really dealt with teenagers' right to privacy." Soon she becomes infatuated with Jessica, a sullen, dark-haired girl she meets in a neighborhood cyber-cafe. The one thing Skye's mother is not receptive to is her daughter's lesbianism, and clashes are inevitable when Jessica introduces Skye to a world of raves, drugs and casual sexual encounters. When Jessica has a breakdown of her own, Skye realizes that avoiding reality has its price and begins to come to terms with the key actors in her life: her mother, who wants to "heal" her but ends up in the hospital herself; her well-intentioned but absent father, who is an independent filmmaker in L.A.; her "boyfriend" Riley; Jessica's friend Mol, an exuberant, self-titled Pagan; and Lorri, a volleyball teammate who turns out to be more than just another straitlaced jock. Williams writes in clipped, unemotional prose, underscoring the theme that innocence is hard to find but that naivete is rampant (especially among adults). Somehow in this chaotic and self-indulgent California terrain, her wounded young protagonist emerges as the most reasonable voice of all. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Sixteen-year-old Skye is in the process of creating herself: smart and pretty, she has a boyfriend but dreams of finding a girlfriend. She's trying to figure out if she wants to be one of the jocks, nerds or goths or just friends with them. Both of Skye's parents are irresponsible. Her mother, for example, keeps trying to drag her into a world of cultish New Age types, threatening to withhold support for Skye's college education. Skye's efforts to get politically/socially involved necessitate avoiding adults who would prey on young people. The frightening vulnerability of being on the threshold of adulthood is convincingly re-created, and teens might identify with Skye's efforts to forge a family of choice to replace her unreliable family of origin. However, the explicit, mainly heterosexual sex scenes and a story line involving satanic abuse put this at most at the upper reaches (ages 17 and up) of the YA category; moreover, the side of teenage life shown here, with kids experimenting with drugs and sex, is one many adults disapprove of and deny in their own pasts. A promising if controversial beginning leads to an abrupt, wholly unsatisfactory ending just as Skye hits a crisis. Regretfully not recommended.?Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., NJCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Skye, the daughter of two old drug-drenched hippies, lives with her currently New Age mother, Anna, and wants desperately to stay out of her mom's way, go away to college, and meet the right girl. Closest to her is boyfriend Riley, with whom she shares an orgasmic though not sexually interactive relationship and also a fair number of her fantasies about Jessica, the quasi-punk, mysterious girl in black to whom she is irresistibly drawn. Increasingly distraught over her daughter's proclaimed bisexuality, Anna discards the old watchwords peace, love, and understanding, and eventually forces various cures, in the form of self-growth workshops and alternative healings, on Skye. In the surreal setting of Southern California phoniness and New Age hipness, adolescence seems as irrelevant as the ostensible adults whose job it is to help teens navigate it. Finally, Skye's peers Mol and Lorrie help her find a way to her own authenticity--no easy task in an environment of packaged foods and feelings. Whitney Scott


Review
"Bett Williams makes you laugh and then makes you feel guilty for laughing. Girl Walking Backwards is brilliant Southern gothic merged with punk rock and moved West. An honest, tender, and nasty rendering of self-mutilation and New Age fascism, this book establishes Williams as one of the most original novelists around." --Barry Graham, author of The Book of Man and Before

"Girl Walking Backwards is about style and vulnerability and trying to grow up in a world without adults. Author Bett Williams is smart, charming, writes about characters engagingly, and knows how to drive a sentence." --Blanche McCrary Boyd, author of Terminal Velocity, The Revolution of Little Girls, and The Redneck Way of Knowledge

"Authentic in both pain and humor, Girl Walking Backwards is the tale of a girl lost, whose plight is as touchable as it is believable." --Steven Levenkron, author of The Best Little Girl in the World, The Luckiest Girl in the World and Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self Mutilation



Review
"Bett Williams makes you laugh and then makes you feel guilty for laughing. Girl Walking Backwards is brilliant Southern gothic merged with punk rock and moved West. An honest, tender, and nasty rendering of self-mutilation and New Age fascism, this book establishes Williams as one of the most original novelists around." --Barry Graham, author of The Book of Man and Before

"Girl Walking Backwards is about style and vulnerability and trying to grow up in a world without adults. Author Bett Williams is smart, charming, writes about characters engagingly, and knows how to drive a sentence." --Blanche McCrary Boyd, author of Terminal Velocity, The Revolution of Little Girls, and The Redneck Way of Knowledge

"Authentic in both pain and humor, Girl Walking Backwards is the tale of a girl lost, whose plight is as touchable as it is believable." --Steven Levenkron, author of The Best Little Girl in the World, The Luckiest Girl in the World and Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self Mutilation



Review
"Bett Williams makes you laugh and then makes you feel guilty for laughing. Girl Walking Backwards is brilliant Southern gothic merged with punk rock and moved West. An honest, tender, and nasty rendering of self-mutilation and New Age fascism, this book establishes Williams as one of the most original novelists around." --Barry Graham, author of The Book of Man and Before

"Girl Walking Backwards is about style and vulnerability and trying to grow up in a world without adults. Author Bett Williams is smart, charming, writes about characters engagingly, and knows how to drive a sentence." --Blanche McCrary Boyd, author of Terminal Velocity, The Revolution of Little Girls, and The Redneck Way of Knowledge

"Authentic in both pain and humor, Girl Walking Backwards is the tale of a girl lost, whose plight is as touchable as it is believable." --Steven Levenkron, author of The Best Little Girl in the World, The Luckiest Girl in the World and Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self Mutilation



Book Description
Skye wants what all teenagers want--to survive high school. She lives in Southern California, though, which is making that difficult. Her mother has fallen victim to the pseudo-New Age culture and insists on dragging her to consciousness-raising workshops and hypnotists. As if this weren't difficult enough, Skye falls in love with Jessica, a troubled gothic punk girl who cuts herself regularly with sharp objects. When she finds her boyfriend having sex with Jessica in a bathroom stall at a rave, her romantic illusions collapse and she has to face the fact that she's been running away from her mother's insanity. Right when things look their worst though, Skye is helped by Mol, a pagan who becomes her true friend, and Lorri, a graceful volelyball player with whom she finds real love. From them she learns how to feel authentic emotions in a culture of poseurs and New Age charlatans. In this anti-coming-of-age novel, where growing up is irrelevant, this is the best gift of all.



From the Publisher
Praise for Girl Walking Backwards: "Bett Williams makes you laugh and then makes you feel guilty for laughing. Girl Walking Backwards is brilliant Southern gothic merged with punk rock and moved West. An honest, tender, and nasty rendering of self-mutilation and New Age fascism, this book establishes Williams as one of the most original novelists around." --Barry Graham, author of The Book of Man and Before "Girl Walking Backwards is about style and vulnerability and trying to grow up in a world without adults. Author Bett Williams is smart, charming, writes about characters engagingly, and knows how to drive a sentence." --Blanche McCrary Boyd, author of Terminal Velocity, The Revolution of Little Girls, and The Redneck Way of Knowledge "Authentic in both pain and humor, Girl Walking Backwards is the tale of a girl lost, whose plight is as touchable as it is believable." --Steven Levenkron, author of The Best Little Girl in the World, The Luckiest Girl in the World, and Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation


About the Author
Bett Williams was raised in California. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is her first novel.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Skye wants what all teenagers want--to survive high school. She lives in Southern California, though, which is making that difficult. Her mother has fallen victim to the pseudo-New Age culture and insists on dragging her to consciousness-raising workshops and hypnotists. As if this weren't difficult enough, Skye falls in love with Jessica, a troubled gothic punk girl who cuts herself regularly with sharp objects. When she finds her boyfriend having sex with Jessica in a bathroom stall at a rave, her romantic illusions collapse and she has to face the fact that she's been running away from her mother's insanity. Right when things look their worst though, Skye is helped by Mol, a pagan who becomes her true friend, and Lorri, a graceful volelyball player with whom she finds real love. From them she learns how to feel authentic emotions in a culture of poseurs and New Age charlatans. In this anti-coming-of-age novel, where growing up is irrelevant, this is the best gift of all.

SYNOPSIS

Skye is just a teenage girl struggling to find a little honesty and affection in a culture of poseurs and a family that tries to stifle her emerging sexuality. Williams writes with a sharp eye for character and emotional detail, presenting a tableau of modern youth culture in southern California in this funny and poignant "anti-coming-of-age" novel.

FROM THE CRITICS

Out Magazine

"Let's stop kidding ourselves. California is a god-awful scary place where the golden glow of sex and drugs hides the money-soaked carcass of emotional vampirism. If you don't believe it, this agile and devastating portrait of a young California dyke will convince you. Skye is a senior in high school. Her parents fed her LSD as a child, her boyfriend watches her jerk off and tries to help her get a girlfriend, and she and the girl she wants to kiss dress dead birds in Barbie clothes. But the outrageous and the hilarious are actually the foundations of Skye's exquisite sanity. It's her mother's new age homophobia that wears her down. Dragged from one encounter group to another, threatened with hypnotism and rebirthing classes, Skye and her scortching virgin sexuality are under emotional and psychic siege. By the time this strangely funny novel has shown us Skye's ghastly movie mogul dad in action down in L.A., then takes us back up to Santa Barbara in time for her mother to rocket into queer-hating orbit, you'll never want to go to California again. But don't despair; Williams is a good fairy after all, blessing her work and its achingly gay heroine with lovely youthful sex, as redemptive as it gets."

Publishers Weekly

Williams confronts coming-of-age angst in this dry, often angry debut about a 16-year-old lesbian who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., with her skittish mother, a spaced-out New Age divorcee on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Despite her parents' rocky breakup, Skye's world has managed to hang together, if precariously. She volunteers to work for Planned Parenthood because "it was the only organization that really dealt with teenagers' right to privacy." Soon she becomes infatuated with Jessica, a sullen, dark-haired girl she meets in a neighborhood cyber-cafe. The one thing Skye's mother is not receptive to is her daughter's lesbianism, and clashes are inevitable when Jessica introduces Skye to a world of raves, drugs and casual sexual encounters. When Jessica has a breakdown of her own, Skye realizes that avoiding reality has its price and begins to come to terms with the key actors in her life: her mother, who wants to "heal" her but ends up in the hospital herself; her well-intentioned but absent father, who is an independent filmmaker in L.A.; her "boyfriend" Riley; Jessica's friend Mol, an exuberant, self-titled Pagan; and Lorri, a volleyball teammate who turns out to be more than just another straitlaced jock. Williams writes in clipped, unemotional prose, underscoring the theme that innocence is hard to find but that naivete is rampant (especially among adults). Somehow in this chaotic and self-indulgent California terrain, her wounded young protagonist emerges as the most reasonable voice of all. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Sixteen-year-old Skye is in the process of creating herself: smart and pretty, she has a boyfriend but dreams of finding a girlfriend. She's trying to figure out if she wants to be one of the jocks, nerds or goths or just friends with them. Both of Skye's parents are irresponsible. Her mother, for example, keeps trying to drag her into a world of cultish New Age types, threatening to withhold support for Skye's college education. Skye's efforts to get politically/socially involved necessitate avoiding adults who would prey on young people. The frightening vulnerability of being on the threshold of adulthood is convincingly re-created, and teens might identify with Skye's efforts to forge a family of choice to replace her unreliable family of origin. However, the explicit, mainly heterosexual sex scenes and a story line involving satanic abuse put this at most at the upper reaches (ages 17 and up) of the YA category; moreover, the side of teenage life shown here, with kids experimenting with drugs and sex, is one many adults disapprove of and deny in their own pasts. A promising if controversial beginning leads to an abrupt, wholly unsatisfactory ending just as Skye hits a crisis. Regretfully not recommended.--Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., NJ

Kirkus Reviews

A tedious tribute to the agony of being 16 and subject to sexual frustration, backstabbing friends, disinterested teachers, and mother-daughter screaming matches. The character who guides readers through this dreary landscape is notable most of all for her loneliness. Ignored by a hip Hollywood dad and nagged at by her dippy, domineering, New Age mom, precocious Skye becomes increasingly alienated from bland suburbia, southern California style, as she embarks on a quest to find a lesbian soulmate. An all-consuming crush on Jessica, whose brief backwards stroll gives the book its curious title, quickly escalates after one public kiss at a sweaty high school party. (Naturally, the popular girls are disgusted, the jocks intrigued.) Skye and Jessicaþs relationship veers sharply from the breathless best friendsþ stage into crisis, though, when Jessicaþs self-inflicted cuts become deeper and more frequent. When she ends up in the hospital, followed there in a blink by Skyeþs pill-popping mother, Skye joins the ranks of semihomeless teenagers whose nomadic, unattached lives she admires. Two friends invite her to a cybercafe and the occasional rave, but otherwise Skye is completely on her own. Her isolation is more than a little distressing, and Williams beats her readers over the head with it: The only person Skye ever connects with is Jessica, who is eventually secreted away to a long-term psychiatric hospital without, it seems, a backward glance. Anyoneþs lingering nostalgia for high school years will disappear after a few pages of Skyeþs circuitous, self-conscious conversations with her friends in this novel of adolescent insecurity and confusion, adebut effort that nevertheless remains strangely unsatisfyingþin part because the strings on these puppets are so obviously traceable to an adult hand.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Authentic in both pain and humor, Girl Walking Backwards is the tale of a girl lost, whose plight is as touchable as it is believable. — Steven Levenkron

Girl Walking Backwards is about style and vulnerability and trying to grow up in a world without adults. Author Bett Williams is smart, charming, writes about characters engagingly, and knows how to drive a sentence. — Blanche McCrary Boyd