"As the silver Honda slipped into the never-ending weave of cars, Allie turned and saw Jonas, naked except for his socks, running toward her." I paused after I read that sentence. I wasn't using a piece of scratch paper as a bookmark as I usually do, and I got up to get a pen and paper to make sure I didn't forget about it. It contains all the major themes of The Wonder Bread Summer--cars, questionable choices, frenetic-paced action, and weird sexual interactions. It implies that the protagonist is the girl--probably a young girl, her name is Allie, and that she is being pursued. If you were to distill Wonder Bread down to one sentence, it would essentially be this sentence.Wonder Bread takes off like a rocket with the very first page [questionable choice] [weird sexual interaction]. For the next 259 pages, Allie is on the run [cars] and doing all that she can to stay alive [frenetic-paced action]. In her quest to continue living, Allie reunites with her aging-groupie mother, grows a little closer to her father, and even has sex with a punk rock star [questionable choice]. Wonder Bread really doesn't let up until the last page.
My fiance read Wonder Bread before I did, and said she wasn't sure that I would like it. She said that it reminded her of the steamrolling adventures that Carl Hiaasen writes. I have never read anything written by Carl Hiaasen, but my fiance assures me that the comparison is apt, so I thought I would pass it on. Despite my fiance's doubts, I really enjoyed this book. Wonder Bread was a fun, well-paced romp along the West Coast of 1983.
The cover Wonder Bread does it no favors. It conveys none of the absurdity present on nearly every page of this, Jessica Anya Blau's third novel. A book with a back-flap synopsis that describes it as being "loosely based on Alice in Wonderland" needs cover art that conveys the same.
