Like a Woman

January 5, 2015
First-time novelist Busman begins this gut-wrenching tale of childhood sexual and physical abuse in Los Angeles toward the end of the Vietnam War. At age seven, Taylor is already keeping secrets about her uncle’s late-night visits to her bed and tiptoeing around her violent, alcoholic mother. Three years later she’s smoking pot, running with a band of adolescent thieves, and spending nights alone in the park to escape her mother’s rage-fueled attacks. By the time she’s 15, she’s a full-fledged runaway living on the streets, selling drugs—and herself—to survive. Accustomed to having nothing and no one to rely on, Taylor is shocked to discover a semblance of community, family, and love among the other young girls that call the city’s alleyways and SROs home. But even as she begins to relax into this bit of happiness, a brutalized Taylor looks expectantly, and heartbreakingly, over her shoulder for the blow she expects will come. Switching between past and present and interspersed with musings from an adult Taylor, Busman’s prose is fittingly straightforward and, at times, bleakly, brilliantly sparse. This is a laudable debut.

February 15, 2015
A look at the scorched-earth terrain of a miserable childhood and hardscrabble life on the streets; there's a tough girl named Taylor at the center, coming of age in some of the hardest circumstances. Busman's beautifully written debut novel takes place in dirt-poor suburban Los Angeles, though the accents and idiom seem Southern at first, but that might be immaterial-poverty and moral chaos are the setting. The novel dips into episodes in Taylor's life, beginning when she's 7 and part of a tightknit group of children who band together to protect each other from their nightmarish, abusive parents; the deck is stacked against them, and near the beginning of the book, they mourn the loss of a crippled child who has suffered appalling parental abuse. Later, a young teenage Taylor takes to the streets, finding a girlfriend, Jackson, and a car interior to sleep in, which, after the horrors of her childhood home, seems like a refuge. She does drugs, steals compulsively, turns tricks, and tries to nurture her relationship with Jackson, a likable girl working on being a writer amid this rough life. Busman (California State/Humanities and Communication) has perfect pitch for the street slang her characters use and a nice rhythm in her prose, but the specter of kids fighting exploitative adults seems like familiar, even generic, territory. Taylor's fierce attitude at times verges on corny, with nothing but loss and bad luck coming her way and love also proving a roller coaster (though Busman is at her most lyrical in conveying its sweet power, too). Near the end, a scene of Taylor battling a colt on a ranch gives a glimpse of what Busman is capable of-the novel rears to life, with Taylor for once using her strength against something that isn't mysteriously set against her, but naturally so. A late episode involving a near drowning also has staggering power, again allowing something elemental to blow open the novel's focus, which is occasionally too narrow. Finding the depth in a character's struggle is the novelist's task, and Busman does get there but somehow does not make her protagonist specific enough until the very end.

March 1, 2015

Fourteen-year-old Taylor already had a bag packed the night her mother came home and hit her, and after shoving back she heads out into the Los Angeles night, away from the fear, sexual abuse, and sense of not belonging engendered by her family. Soon she's making her way on the street according to her rules ("I've been fucked all my life and I've never had to wear a dress yet"); befriending girls like Jackson, whom she saves from a knifing; and stealing from Sears (the guards ignore her as the only white girl in her group). VERDICT Fine portrait painting with key social context; the language is toughly lyric and the narrative finally brushed with grace.

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