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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9780743261708
ISBN number: 0743261704
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: February 08, 2005
Publishing house: Simon & Schuster
Sale Popularity Level: 286635
Studio: Simon & Schuster
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Product Description:
FEMME FATALES
OBSESSIVE LOVE
DOUBLE CROSSES
How does a respectable young woman fall into Los Angeles' hard-boiled underworld?
Shadow-dodging through the glamorous world of 1950s Hollywood and its seedy flip side, Megan Abbott's debut, Die a Little, is a gem of the darkest hue. This ingenious twist on a classic noir tale tells the story of Lora King, a schoolteacher, and her brother Bill, a junior investigator with the district attorney's office. Lora's comfortable, suburban life is jarringly disrupted when Bill falls in love with a mysterious young woman named Alice Steele, a Hollywood wardrobe assistant with a murky past.
Made sisters by marriage but not by choice, the bond between Lora and Alice is marred by envy and mistrust. Spurred on by inconsistencies in Alice's personal history and possibly jealous of Alice's hold on her brother, Lora finds herself lured into the dark alleys and mean streets of seamy Los Angeles. Assuming the role of amateur detective, she uncovers a shadowy world of drugs, prostitution, and ultimately, murder.
Lora's fascination with Alice's 'sins' increases in direct proportion to the escalation of her own relationship with Mike Standish, a charmingly amoral press agent who appears to know more about his old friend Alice than he reveals. The deeper Lora digs to uncover Alice's secrets, the more her own life begins to resemble Alice's sinister past -- and present.
Steeped in atmospheric suspense and voyeuristic appeal, Die a Little shines as a dark star among Hollywood lights.
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Rated by buyers 
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This is a terrific and dark read about an obsessive brother/sister relationship and the lady with a shady past who threatens it. I'm not going to make this a long review. I don't want to reveal too much, but if you like noir, you'll be rewarded with this book. It has all the seaminess and sharply drawn characters you expect to find in noir. The story is told by the sister who reveals more of her character than she realizes. The Raymond Chandler influence is obvious, especially as it's set in 1950's L.A. However, you'll also find a lot of James Cain in this. The author is indead a student of filn noir
Rated by buyers 
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You know that urban myth, story, or whatever that says if you put a frog in boiling water, it'll jump out. However, if you put a frog in cold water and turn up the heat, it'll be boiled alive because it can't recognize the changes around it? Keep that in mind as you read Die a Little (2005), Megan Abbott's rich noir debut.
Recently, my mom asked me what I meant by the term "noir." I told her that it derived from the term the French gave to the dark, black-and-white films in the immediate post-World-War-II years. These stark films, usually crime dramas, focused on people living in a world rent open by the horrors of global war and near genocide. Cynicism was openly displayed. Morality seemed to take a siesta for six years and many people wondered why it all mattered. The films, and later novels and short stories, usually had gangsters, femme fatales, cops, private investigators, and all sorts of people life seemed to turn away. And in many of these stories, regular people stumbled through a shadowy door, a door they rarely noticed and, if they did, walked past quickly or on the other side of the street. Because what these regular people saw when they opened their eyes on the other side of that door changed them forever. They can't un-see what they've seen. They just try to get back out of the door as quickly as possible and try to forget. But they can't.
Lora King is one of those people. She's a school teacher and the sister of Bill King, a junior investigator with the DA's office. With their parents dead, they are the only family each of them has and they cling to each other like drifters on a life raft. They do anything to protect each other, they love being with each other. They are content. Until Alice Steele shows up and changes everything.
But, like the frog in water, the change is not instant. No, it's gradual, a simmer that slowly captures you, the reader. It starts off with Alice and Bill getting married--saw that coming, didn't you?--and, just like that, Lora has a sister, a new family member, and someone with whom to share Bill and his attention. Alice dives into being the best housewife in the history of housewives, throwing lavish parties, baking all day, and, presumably, satisfying Bill in bed, probably every night. However, Alice's domestic actions hide a past, a past that Lora starts to question and investigate. She's the regular person who has gone through the dark door. Unlike other protagonists in some stories, Lora steps in willingly. And stays. And looks around. And then goes deeper, looking for the truth. What she finds disturbs her, makes her worry about her brother's safety. And then people--men--start noticing her. But it's not the men she's worried about. It's Alice.
Megan Abbott has earned rave reviews for her very first three novels, Die a Little, The Song is You, and Queenpin, the last of which earned her an Edgar Award. In her very first book, she takes us back to 1950s Los Angeles. Like many old-school authors who actually wrote in that decade, Abbott's book evokes the Eisenhower era in a pitch perfect manner. Honestly there is a certainly timelessness to the tone of the novel. I listened to the audiobook version via Audible so I didn't read the dust jacket. I didn't know if the 1950s was referenced or not. I just went with it knowing it was a period piece. It wasn't until some character mentioned Maime Eisenhower that I knew it was in the 1950s. But the book lives in that wistful feel of yesterday, when all was better. Or so we thought.
The little nuances Abbott inserts into the prose really give this novel a sense of place and time: the Philco TV, Doris Day records playing at a party, Louis Prima on the radio. Even the little nicknacks of a 1950s housewife--copper baking pans, Joy of Cooking cookbook, themed parties--enveloped me as I listened to this story. If you can't quite get a mental image of the 1950s reading Die a Little--don't know how you couldn't--just watch "Mad Men" and then bring some of those images back with you. I know the years of the TV show "Mad Men" are the early 1960s before Jack Kennedy was shot. But historical eras are not always defined by years. The "1950s" as an era lasted from Ike's election in 1952 until the gunshots rang out in Dallas, TX, in 1963. As such, the visual quality of "Mad Men" and the visual prose of Die a Little share a common bond.
The prose style is interesting and subtle. The main characteristic of the prose is the voice. This is a very first person story with Lora telling us everything. When she is relaying current events, she uses the present tense. When she's letting you know something that happened in the past, she uses the past tense. I'll admit that it certainly made the flashback scenes immediately evident. Sometimes, third person narrators have to use the past perfect tense to note flashbacks: "When L. B. Jeffries had seen his neighbor, Lars Thorwald, apparently ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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I was mildly depressed to read in the liner notes that the author is a PhD writing teacher. I also must confess that after waiting for about a hundred pages for something interesting to happen I gave up.
The very first affectation to irritate me was the narrator's use of the present tense to describe things that clearly occurred in the past. There must be a reason for this, but trying unsuccessfully to figure out what that reason is was a distraction. Good writing says what it means and means what it says.
This book's writing style in general is verbose and tedious, overladen with unnecessary qualifiers and sentences that go nowhere. It is an affront to good writing that the liner notes liken this book to Raymond Chandler, who didn't waste words. In response to possible accusations of sexism, Sara Paretsky doesn't waste words, either.
Another affectation that got up my nose was the use of "you" to mean "me", as in, "... a face caught in the mirror, a smear of what you were a few hours ago. You totter, you catch a smudgy glimpse, you see an eyelash hanging a bit, lipstick bleeding over the lip line." Not me, sister; none of that ever happened to me. What rot!
I hope nobody of any talent becomes ruined by Ms Abbott's writing classes. They'd do better to read The Elements of Style, instead.
Rated by buyers -
Rapid-fire noir of the sort that forces you to read it in one sitting, even more remarkable because it's 241 pages are written by a first-time author. And not just any author, an English Ph. D. and professor whose previous work was entitled: "The Street was mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir." A female professor.
So when the academic turns her hand to practitioner, how does she fare? Classicly well. It is written from the first-person perspective of Lora, the sister of Bill King, rising star in the D. A.'s office, who through happenstance meets and falls hard for Alice, as it turns out a sharp customer with a deeply troubled past.
Alice pulls Lora and Bill and their middle-class friends into her world of drugs, sex, and physical abuse.
The perspective works well, as Lora's love for her brother and joy in his happiness are only gradually overshadowed by slowly-mounting clues to Alice's real character. And as Alice argues violently at the climax of the action, Lora even seemed to find herself drawn to the titillating side of the dark lifestyle that Alice had lived and couldn't leave.
Given the author's career and training, the reader wonders if this is a one-time excursion to see how well she could write what she'd studied, or if this will be a career move for Abbott.
Rated by buyers -
Although I'm a big fan of noir films, this was my very first noir novel. What a treat! Abbott's style has a dreamy, poetic quality, yet she manages to move the story forward at a rapid pace. All the characters are rich and complex, and the period details are great fun. I look forward to reading more of Abbott's work.
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