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Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa was a good read. I’m from the South, and worked in New Orleans for a short while before Katrina. The book excellently captures the feel and tone of the area. If you’ve been there, and I mean there as in not just in the Quarter you’ll know that might not be the best tone to capture. The poverty, crime, and feeling of helplessness and inability to escape from the dead-end that surrounds New Orleans is excellently captured. The characters lives and their emotions came across really well. Unfortunately I didn’t find their lives something I could identify with… thankfully, and the primary emotion was despair, bleak mind-numbing despair.

European movies have to me always felt like they were different from US movies in that they seemed to be snippets of life without huge climaxes and then a nice tidy resolution scene where all the ends are tied up like most American movies. Dirty Little Angels is the same way. The book is like turning on the TV and coming in part way through a movie about someone’s life and watching a few hours and then turning it off without knowing how the players got there or what happened later. There’s no neat little resolution here. Life isn’t neatly wound up with little bows either.

They say the sign of a good book is that when you’re done reading it you want to read more. I usually agree with that. Here I didn’t want to read more because I was sympathetic to the characters, but I wanted to read more because I wanted to know that things turned out OK for them in spite of all the other crap going on in their lives. I hope they’re OK. They were in the shadow of a city that swallows people alive when I found them, and they still were when I left them. I recommend the book if you enjoy Southern fiction or books with/about New Orleans.

I received a free copy of this book digitally in exchange for reviewing it. I got a review copy and I agreed to review it. I didn’t get paid and I didn’t rate it higher or lower because of being given a review copy. I thought it only fair that I mention that. And yes. I read it on my kindle and I still love my kindle. I’m off to read it again now!

The Book Review: Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.