Driving With Shannon

Rating:
Summary: Conundrum
Review: A wonderful insight into the inner workings of a character you can never quite know or even understand, while at the same time fully comprehending every action and thought that the writer presents to you. If you have ever known or loved a punk rocker, get a glimpse of them here from their own mind, and feel how similiar we all really are, with or without the soapy mohawk.

Rating:
Summary: Driving with Shannon
Review: Do you remember what it was like to be a teenager? Were you a punk rocker? Poor? Did you desperately want to be an anarchist? Sven Robinson remembers these things remarkably well. In fact, one has the feeling that he still is a teenager, recounting his run-away from home cross-country trip, his first girlfriends, his slacker attitude and his sporadic depression. This book is unusually honest and unaffected in its depiction of a world where a job lasts long enough to buy groceries and girlfriends don't last much longer.
In this autobiographical novel, the author portrays himself alternately as sweet and obnoxious, accompanying a scared girl to an abortion one minute and the next, throwing a couple of sick kittens in the dumpster and scarring himself with razor blades. One can't help falling in love with Sven Anarki, the arch bad boy.
S. Robinson does an accurate job of depicting the poverty in Maine. I also grew up in rural Maine, spending time in friend's trailers and struggling to buy clothes. Somehow this world is a refreshing change from the multitude of spoiled teenagers with cell phones and SUVs that surround my current home.
Although Robinson's prose is sometimes choppy, he succeeds in drawing you into his world. I felt the book was deeply affecting me. I actually pulled out my teenage diaries and read them and my fantasies slipped towards quitting my job and hitting the road.

Rating:
Summary: Spellbinding, humorous, horrifying, and screaming of truth
Review: If you want to experience, or perhaps relive, the eclectic mixture of GLAMOUR, DESPAIR and FIERCE DETERMINATION that made up the mid 80's punk rock scene, let Sven Anarki tell you all about it, he knows.
When boredom and distain for constraints of any kind drive two desperate teenagers to drop out of high school, they hit the road in a last ditch effort at life, disguised as a random cross country search for anarchy. Follow their cigarette butt strewn path from one American punk scene to the next as dwindling funds make the difficult choices between food, smokes, soap and Aquanet (both for ever lengthening Mohawks) become more obvious.
Keeping their demons at bay with razor blades, gritty determination, and a bizarre sense of humor, they manage to focus not only on the daily survival game and relentless pursuit of girls, but on their own evolving relationship, eventually realizing that what is saving them is not the will to survive, but their allied effort in the struggle not to give up.
Written with no affectation, it is pure storytelling, and with such vivid descriptions and frightening detail, it will make YOUR hair stand straight up.