A vivid told-in-the-first-person stream-of-consciousness account of one young lady's adventures as she finds herself amidst the bohemian whirl of 1990s San Francisco... or a root through my own memories?

For as you read it, you find it's all too real. Now I'm a bit older than the central figure, so I was doing magazine mash-ups a decade earlier when computers were massive things that lived in universities and the internet hadn't been invented... and I've never been to San Francisco either... but the whole thing springs to life, as real as my own memories, resonating with some of the oddball folks I mixed with and escapades that I got up to... Yes. This is getting too personal for a review, but I'm not going to apologise: this is how the book stirred me up and it probably will do the same for you.

OK. Plot is simple: young girl heads off to the big city to make some cash to pay Dad's medical bills, and to establish herself as an independent entity away from her family. We meet the people she mixes with, from eccentric house-mates to devious employers, charting the progress of her love life and her social activities, and end up sharing her happiness, her confusion, her pain (and the time she threw up into a trash can) because it is told in a vivid, breathless style that sweeps you along into Sarah's life as if she were sitting on the sofa telling you about it.

Eminently readable. Memorable. Evocative. Engaging. This is a life that could well have been lived, and one well worth reading about.

For the role-player: If your game is set in this time and place, it's worth mining for the evocative descriptions of places and people to form a rich backdrop. The plot is not the stuff role-playing adventures are made from, it's not that sort of tale, but if you want exotic yet realistic contemporary NPCs to enrich your alternate reality this is a good resource.

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Reviewed: 10 February 2012