In a very matter-of-fact telling of a story that is anything but, a twentysomething gal with self-destructive tendencies narrates her life as if she were looking at it from the outside, providing unflinching portrayals of sex, drugs, and depression. In nonlinear snippets, readers learn about her daughter and failed marriage, her one-night stands, her self-cutting, drinking, and general detached malaise. The one thing that brings her life focus is her job as a waitress. While everything else appears to be teetering on the edge of no return, she hones her craft as a server and takes pride in her work ethic, the source of a glimmer of hope for a more positive sense of self. Rona Jaffe Award winner Tierce's use of an intimate first-person voice renders the alienation her narrator feels in stark relief, evincing a sensibility much like singer-songwriter Liz Phair's unique brand of sexual authority and sadness. There's an honesty here. Tierce's first novel is unsentimental and unresolved but ultimately laced with an undercurrent of hope.--Soto, Kate Copyright 2014 Booklist

Tierce's debut allow readers to glimpse into the mind of a young Texas woman intent on harming herself. Her poor decision-making is a self-imposed penitence for abandoning her daughter. Marie, the novel's narrator, gets pregnant at 16. She tries to do what she believes is right and marry the father, but they just can't make it work. Five-plus years as a hard-living waitress follows. Marie flees her family for the Dallas restaurant scene, gets drawn in by the wrong men repeatedly, self-mutilates, and sleeps with whomever will have her. With the drug-fueled restaurant world as a backdrop, Tierce's pages catalogue the joyless and degrading sex to which Aimee submits. The novel feels flat at times, and the number of Aimee's partners rises steadily without much change to her situation. But the depths of her self-loathing, related bluntly and almost offhandedly, give the book a weight and a resonance that defies its matter-of-fact voice. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In this shocking debut novel by Tierce, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award recipient and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Maria is a smart but self-destructive young woman working as a waitress at a high-end Dallas steakhouse who attempts to lose herself in the sex- and drug-filled world of the service industry. She has encounters with many men customers, coworkers, and occasionally her husband while endlessly degrading herself. Tierce jumps fearlessly into the surreal world that is Maria's life, taking the reader along on a terrifying ride. Unfortunately, though Tierce is a gifted writer who has made Maria's emotional damage obvious, it's difficult to feel sympathy for Maria or the other equally unlikable characters and nearly impossible to care about what finally happens to her. Though the novel is full of astute observations of the human psyche, the lack of emotional connection between the reader and the main character (something Judith Rossner managed to achieve in Looking for Mr. Goodbar) makes the explicit sex scenes feel gratuitous and obscene. VERDICT An unsympathetic and disturbing look at a lost woman's search for connection via sex and drugs among a group of dysfunctional restaurant workers. [See Prepub Alert, 3/24/14; see also "Summer Best Debuts," First Novels, LJ 7/14.] Lisa Block, Atlanta (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.