Rainey Royal (2014) by Dylan Landis

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Rainey Royal (2014)

by Dylan Landis

Greenwich Village, New York

New York:  54/105

Manhattan: 10/34

  Rainey Royal by Dylan Landis belongs to a well established category in 1,001 Novels: A Library of Ameria, a bildungsroman written from the POV of a quirky teenage girl grappling with difficult family circumstances.  The characteristics of the protagonist. difficult family circumstances and geographic location change, but not much else.  As an example of things that don't change from book-to-book: Use of a first-person narrator with framing from an unnamed third person narrator, a narrative arc that starts just before puberty and ends after puberty, parents who "work" in a wholly unconvincing way and who say things real parents never tell their children. 

 

  Here, we are dealing with the white daughter of a single dad who is a jazz musician in Greenwich Village in the 1970's.  The most unusual aspect of this novel is that Landis uses a format of linked short stories rather than conventional straight chronological narration.  Not that I noticed, I thought she was just skipping forward in time.   Rainey and her family weren't particularly interesting, they reminded me of lots of troubled/artistic families I knew in the Bay Area growing up in the 1980's and 1990's.   Nor, for that matter, is the author's depiction of Greenwich Village in the 1970's.   There just wasn't much for me love about this book.