The Last Days of California
In this fresh and razor-sharp debut novel, teenage angst and evangelical ardor make a pilgrimage across an endlessly interchangeable American landscape of highways, motels, and strip malls. Sporting a "King Jesus Returns!" t-shirt and well stocked with end-times pamphlets, Jess makes semi-earnest efforts to believe but is thwarted at every turn by a string of familiar and yet freshly rendered teenage obsessions. From "Will the world end?" to "Will I ever fall in love?" each tender worry, big and small, is brilliantly rendered with emotional weight. Mary Miller reinvents the classic American literary road-trip story, reviving its august traditions with the yearning and spiritual ennui of twenty-first-century adolescence. As the last day approaches, Jess's teenage myopia gradually gives way to a growing awareness of the painful undercurrents of her fractured family.
With a deadpan humor and a savage charm that belie a deep sympathy for her characters, Miller captures the gnawing uneasiness, sexual rivalry, and escalating self-doubt of teenage life in America, where the end always seems nigh and our illusions are necessary protections against that which we can't control.
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Mary A. Miller, RN, MSN, CCRN, is Clinical Nursing Instructor at Marymount University School of Nursing, Alexandria, Virginia.
A coming-of-age novel for the faithful and the faithless--and anyone in-between.--Michele Filgate, writer and Events Coordinator at Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
Miller portrays her characters...with an unwavering intensity.... Miller's prose bestows a magnetic beauty on gas-station bathroom stops, Waffle House lunches, and the cast of overfed, overstimulated travelers the Metcalfs encounter along the interstates. ...A plangent portrait of American adolescence.... [She delivers] raw the heartbreaking futility of the Metcalfs' small triumphs, private embarrassments, and poor decisions with such hilarious precision that you become completely involved in their struggles--and, ultimately, in awe of their abiding hope.--Catherine Straut
The Last Days of California is a beautiful examination of youth and family and what it means to be alive (and to fear dying) in contemporary America...every scene...tremble[s] with significance... Rarely, if ever, have we seen young American womanhood painted in such a raw and honest and heartbreaking way.--William Boyle
The Last Days of California is the Sense and Sensibility of pre-Apocalypse America, and Jess and Elise may be my new favorite literary sisters: different as night and day, on a road trip to the Rapture with their Evangelical parents, they find they have nothing to lose but each other. Mary Miller is a ventriloquist of adolescent angst and a nervy surveyor of American culture.--Alexis Smith, author of Glaciers
The Last Days of California...is the debut of a promising new voice, a voice that describes the painful longing for transcendence and connectedness with compelling vividness and candor.--Emily Colette Wilkinson
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