Anatomy of a Girl Gang – A touching story of vulnerability that’s brutal, edgy and explosive

Five young women, all from seriously dysfunctional backgrounds, form the Black Roses, a girl gang that provides them with safety, family, purpose and love as well as cash from their criminal pursuits.

The leader, Mac, has a mother’s who's a junkie; Mercy, an Indo-Canadian, has lost her parents as a child; Kayos, the Shaughnessy kid has been sexually abused by her step-father; Sly Girl, the Native Indian has escapes the hell that’s the rez, and Z, the Chinese graffiti artist can’t conform to her New Canadian family’s cultural expectations.

For a short time these young women, hardly more than girls, come together and share a special bond, but living outside the law as well as dealing with addictions and the psychological issues that haunt them gradually begin to erode the Black Roses from within and without.

Author Ashley Little tells this story from the POV of the five members. Her voice uses street slang that sounds authentic, as do her descriptions of life on the mean streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The writing is fresh, flawless, and powerfully simple. The plot is brutal, edgy and explosive. The format uses short chapters, graphic headings and jumps back and forth from character to character but manages to remain cohesive and extremely readable.

The author took some chances in writing style, format and subject matter and succeeded in all three. Anatomy of a Girl Gang is a ground breaker and worthy of the accolade it’s been receiving. ( )

This very quick read is a disjointed novel told in the voices of different members of the titular gang, and the anthropomorphized voice of "Vancouver". While effective (and enjoyable to read how different characters would report the same details quite differently), the "Vancouver" voice comes across as cheesy and preachy and effectively ruins the gravity of the subject and the story as a whole. The print run also had some production errors (a graphic was missing, then printed over text on another page, etc.). ( )