Godspeed: A Novel

by Lynn Breedlove

Paperback, 2003

Status

Available

Call number

PS3602.R44 G63

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

St. Martin's Griffin (2003), Paperback, 304 pages

Description

Jim is a speed-freak bike messenger whose devotion to her drug habit rivals the intensity of her adoration for Ally, her brilliant stripper girlfriend. When she's forced to choose between drugs and the girl, time and again she succumbs to her addiction-but somehow she's still unable to attain the ultimate high she seeks. After losing her messenger job, Jim works first as a downwardly spiraling drug dealer, then as a roadie for a touring all-girl punk band, and engages in short-lived halfhearted romances while pining for Ally. She winds up staying in a squat house in New York City when the roadie gig ends, and finally begins cleaning up her act. But upon eventually returning home to San Francisco, Jim finds that things have changed in a way she can't reconcile. It's only then she realizes the ultimate rush can't be found in sex, drugs, violence, or even Ally-the source of her rapture is something else entirely.… (more)

Media reviews

Publisher's Weekly

"The narrative can be gratingly autobiographical in tone at times, and the rushed, free-form style is occasionally a bit gimmicky, but this earnest debut is well worth the ride."

User reviews

LibraryThing member kylekatz

This was pretty good. Lynn Breedlove is a member of Tribe 8, which I gather is a lesbian punk band. The book features a butch punk dyke named Jim who is addicted to heroin and in love with a stripper. Oh and she's a bike courier. She was a really cool character, but the writing style seemed like it

was trying too obviously hard to be cool. At first I thought it was cool, but then it just seemed wearing. A randon sample:

"That's when the orange syringe cap on the street looms godlike. It disappears in a blur under wheels and feet. It rewinds and plays back again and again thirty times, the same piece of plastic, block after block, burning bush, big as shit, alert alert right there in the street, saying, Hi, you need to get fucked up."

Also the ending seemed a little weak. Would she get the stripper, would she meet someone else? No, she biked off into the sunset. Lame. Part of it takes place in NYC, when she's a roadie with a lesbian punk band, the rest is in San Francisco. It captures the scene pretty well I think, from a totally drugged out point of view anyway. I think this type of heroine (no pun intended) is needed in literature, but I wish someone could take it a little further than this book does. As it is, it is a colorful look at the life, with a weak plot and a 'cool' chip on it's shoulder.

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LibraryThing member Crowyhead

An amazing novel, along the lines of Michelle Tea's Valencia.

LibraryThing member ericnguyen09

This is a suprising great novel from former Tribe 8 member Lynn Breedlove. From its first words, it grabs the reader and pulls him/her into the world of Jim, a self proclaimed tranny dyke, as she explores the world from California to New York, after being dumped by her lover, a sex worker named

Ally. Comic at times, yet heart-breaking as we see Jim spiral in drug use and loss love, Breedlove's novel is beautiful in everyway, from its characters (from Jim to her mom) to its prose style, poetically rendered within its 287 pages. It is a good read for anyone interested in queer studies and queer lifestyles, such as those defined in Judith Halberstam's "In a Queer Time & Place," but great works of fiction should never be limited to an audience, and works such as "Godspeed" should be read by anyone as part of the American literary canon to be ranked, as Halberstams says, with Burrough's "Naked Lunch." I am just deeply surprised that this hasn't recieved more literary acclaim as within my own library it ranks as one of my favorite pieces of writings.

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