71. Generation Loss - Elizabeth Hand

#1 Cassandra Neary series

Read on my iPhone through Kindle

2007 Small Beer Press

265 pgs.

Adult .... Mystery/CRF

Finished Thanksgiving, 2014

Goodreads rating: 3.79

My rating:    3 (Liked It)

Setting:  Fictional Burnt Harbor, Maine (Downeast) and its outer islands

1st sentence/s:  "There's always a moment where everything changes.  A great photographer -- someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great -- she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don't see it coming, if you blink or you're drunk or just looking the other way -- well, everything changes anyway, it's not like things would have been different."

My comments:  There were parts of this book that were hard from me to imagine....because there are a lot of references to photography and processing film, that sort of thing. The setting, in downeast Maine in winter, I can imagine.  It's dreary, poor, bleak.  The protagonist, Cassandra Neary, is one of the most unlikable characters I've come across.  But that makes her incredibly interesting, actually.  I'm guessing she's around 40, friendless, a kleptomaniac, hardly eats, survives on Jim Beam and speed. A real downer.  This was quite a story, somewhat of a mystery, but more of a contemporary realistic fiction that skirts the edge of a really dark, somewhat bizarre (though real, unfortunately) world. (And I will go on to read another, because I liked it more than I didn't....)

Goodreads book summary:  Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.