Sarah Skilton is the author of
Bruised, a martial arts drama for young adults; and
High and Dry, a hardboiled teen mystery. At the B&N Reads blog she tagged six top behind-the-scenes novels for the tabloid reader, including:
Gonzo Girl, by Cheryl Della Pietra
In the summer of 1992, Pietra worked as an assistant to gonzo journalist/cult novelist Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). In this lightly fictionalized account, which takes place over a longer time span, readers are immersed in a juicy, sordid, bizarre, and drug-fueled roman à clef. Gonzo Girl's narrator, Alley Russo, is a recent Ivy League grad reluctant to set aside her writing dreams to help out at her family’s business, so she leaps at the chance to work for Walker Reade at his ranch in Colorado, where he’s supposed to be finishing a long-delayed manuscript. Alley’s job is to keep him focused on typing at least a page per night to fax to his publisher, but he insists she mix him drinks and keep pace with his round-the-clock ingestion of LSD and cocaine. A coming-of-age tale viewed through a haze of debauchery.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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