We first met Avery in two of the stories featured in Dana Johnson’s award–winning collection Break Any Woman Down. As a young girl, she and her family escape the violent streets of Los Angeles to a more gentrified existence in suburban West Covina. This average life, filled with school, trips to 7–Eleven to gawk at Tiger Beat magazine, and family outings to Dodger Stadium, is soon interrupted by a past she cannot escape, personified in the guise of her violent cousin Keith.
When Keith moves in with her family, he triggers a series of events that will follow Avery throughout her life: to her studies at USC, to her burgeoning career as a painter and artist, and into her relationship with a wealthy Italian who sequesters her in his glass–walled house in the Hollywood Hills. The past will intrude upon Avery’s first gallery show, proving her mother’s adage: Every goodbye aint gone. The dual–narrative of Elsewhere, California illustrates the complicated history of African Americans across the rolling basin of Los Angeles.
About Dana Johnson
Dana Johnson is the author of Break Any Woman Down, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, California, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Editorial Review
Avery, once in suburbia, disconnects, pulled toward angst and rebellion by her new best friend, Brenna, yet ensnared by the hard-line rules of her über-strict parents. Brenna is white, Avery African-American. Also in the mix: Avery’s cousin, Keith, flitting between Avery’s home and his single mother’s house in Victorville—and between trouble and rebellion. The story shifts between Avery’s childhood, descriptions and dialogue redolent of the rural south and of the ’hood, and the present day. Adult Avery lives in a Schnabel house wannabe in the moneyed hills of West Los Angeles. Avery graduated from USC—Johnson’s comprehension of poor girl among the rich is superb—and satisfied her parents’ ambitions. Soon after, she met and moved in with Massimo, an Italian immigrant and successful attorney. Avery holds a business degree, but her passion is art, both painting and collage, metaphorically symbolic of her self-constructed life, “putting together all my pieces of discarded things.” As much as Avery’s art represents the self she constructed, the shadow of Keith, thief and drug addict, hanging over and haunting her life, represents the oppression of choice, success and failure. Johnson’s novel speaks to race, class and culture; white, black, Hispanic and immigrant; the world as it is, and as it should be. – Kirkus Reviews
Review: Finding oneself in ‘Elsewhere, California’
The Chicago Tribune Book Review – June 10, 2012 (Excerpt)
When hasn’t California been a cure? Either a plan B or C — or the “fix.” Fit within that reinvention story, Los Angeles in particular often figures as the white-hot destination: the place where the greatest transformation might take place. Though that gamble may bestow great dividends, too many discover that the odds more likely suggest the delivery of punishing, irrecoverable loss.
Dana Johnson’s first novel, “Elsewhere, California,” explores the space between reinvention and ruin — the freighted pause waiting for resolution.
Woven into this familiar there-to-here narrative is an infrequently voiced twist — the journey told from the point of view of daughters and sons of African American parents who caught the tail wind of the Great Migration out of the South and into the noisy mix of Greater Los Angeles.
The there-to-here story in Avery’s case might as well be a tale of immigrating to another country. Customs, language, values (and with them unexpressed expectations) are a minefield to be negotiated and conquered. [Read the full article...]
UnBound: Battle of the Half-Angels
The Nephillim Chronicles – Book One
by Ronnie Massey
Justin and Theo are just normal teenagers with their teenage problems, until the day they meet their biological fathers, Michael and Uriel, two of the few remaining archangels. They learn, they are nephillim, the half human offspring of angels, and they learn they are not the only ones. In the days of old, nephillim walked the earth. Now heaven’s misfits may be all that stands between mankind and the wrath of Lucifer and the Fallen. But how will a handful of teenagers react when they find out, not only are they not human, but they are the most powerful soldiers in heaven’s army? How will they deal with their newly found powers? And will they be able to stop Lucifer?
UnBound: Battle of the Half-Angels is available at Amazon.com incl. Kindle(US), Amazon.co.uk incl. Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.
