Bad Girl (Paperback)

"Bad Girl" is the tragic story of Lara, a lower middle class girl of unusual beauty and naivete whose obsessive quest for a pop culture romantic life leads her into a series of sexual relationships, first, with her fellow high school students, later, with her high school phys ed instructor, then the companionship of a rough group of dopers, and finally into an abortive career as a call girl. She gradually disintegrates into periods of drug-induced obliviousness, at one point finding herself the object of an attempted gang-rape, left abandoned by the roadside. What happens after that is the sad finale to a young girl's romantic aspirations. Sympathy for Lara is sustained as we observe her self-destructive behavior. The story has some explicit sexual scenes which are not gratuitous, but develop in the course of the youth's misdirected aspirations.