Rating: 
Summary: Buy this Dazzling book!
Review: "There are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself." Darcey Steinke writes a well detailed exploration through the mind and journey of a young girl, Jesse, trying to find herself in San Francisco. Jesse lives with her boyfriend, Bell, in a little apartment. They both seem depressed and lost most of the time. Bell is a sullen bisexual which makes Jesse feel inadequate and unwanted. She goes in search of more and finds the perfect opportunity when her friend,Pig, asks her to find her "daughter", Madison, for her because she is dying. Jesse discovers Madison at a sleazy strip bar. Madison turns out to be one of Pig's old lovers, and is a free spirit with a small drug habit that Jesse finds intriguing. She moves in with her and starts working at the club and prostituting like Madison. She soon loses herself in Madison's dark life. However, she always returns to Bell because she wants him to want her and thinks she is in love with him. She is constantly changing things about herself to get him to like her more, which she realizes makes her exactly like her mother who she finds pathetic and annoying. This realization along with others helps he find herself. I enjoyed reading this book because it has shock appeal and a terrific surprise ending which I'm not going to give away. I also liked it because the characters were all very different and fascinating. Also recommended: THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez
Rating: 
Summary: A good read
Review: 'Suicide Blonde' is tragically beautiful, on the back side a reviewer states 'find beauty where you never thought possible' and I whole heartedly agree with that. It's a perfect way to describe this book. You can find the storyline just about anywhere on this page, about a girl who has a bisexual boyfriend who can't stop thinking about his first love, then moves in with a dancer and realizes she's a dead beat and a mom who worries about her and herself too much. It's actually quite sad, the ending was a bit of a disappointment I must say. I read this book in 3 days, I was fascinated about it but the ending was not as expected ... I guess there would be no other way to end it. I'm not giving anything away, it is worth the read though. Sexual and innovative.
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Summary: Love in a Book
Review: A horribly lame and poorly written book. How this ever got published is beyond me.
Rating: 
Summary: This Book Blows
Review: A horribly lame and poorly written book. How this ever got published is beyond me.
Rating:
Summary: Made me want to commit suicide! A Blonde speaks.
Review: Ah, the well turned phrase. It has moved mountains, and moved bowels. In the case of Darcey Steinke's book, for me, it was the latter. I found this book to be profundly unmoving and completely, laughably unbelievable. And yet, it takes itself so seriously! Steinke's protagonist is a self-absorbed, insecure, and completely unempathetic young woman with manifold unresolved issues with her Mother. In other words, 'pass the bridget jones, and sprinkle her with leather and piss'. It's just so boring and contrived it made me concoct fantasies of my own suicide while reading it. Let's see...yet another novel about a woman in her 20's obsessed with an unattainable man who tumbles headlong into self destruction and bemoans every aspect of her life while simultaneously possessing immense beauty, privilege, and educational background. How very droll!Noone in this book ever eats, sleep, goes to work, or has a satisfying personal encounter, and yet they all have roofs over their heads and cash for nine dollar cocktails in the Tenderloin. Believe it or not, I really wanted to love this book. Steinke writes beautifully and lyrically in a way that suggests great talent. But the scenes of sexual depravity are just all so unconvincing. You never really *believe* that jess is living all of these experiences. She's clearly just fabricating them, as she fabricates her relationship with Bell. And the suicide at the end is such an anti-climax it's almost funny. Despite my disdain for this book, I'd probably read her next one, simply to see if she's grown into what she seems capable of being-- an incredibly gifted lyric noverlist whose stories are currently too fanciful and bizarre to be even interesting. This book should be listed under sci-fi.
Rating:
Summary: Dark Book with Wonderful Images
Review: Darcey Steinke can string words together breathlessly and, often, dazzlingly. The proof is Suicide Blonde, a dark trip through the sexual underbelly of a town as Jesse follows her boyfriend, Bell, and discovers much about herself.... It is almost structured as a series of short stories. The weakness of the book is the lack of connection with any of the characters for this reader, except perhaps at times with Jesse, or the characters to each other keeping the adventures from becoming truly erotic and remaining instead merely sexual. The fine imagery keeps the story flowing. It is a fine, quick read and a perceptive look at a different world that, in the end, is not so different.
Rating:
Summary: You'll want to read Final Exit afterwards.
Review: Darcy Steinke, Suicide Blonde (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992) 'ware the media event-book, film, whatever it may be-that is presented as something "in the tradition of." Robert Olmstead says on the back cover of Steinke's second novel that it is in the tradition of Djuna Barnes, Georges Bataille, and Marguerite Duras; certainly the kind of recommendationt hat is going to get under the skin of any connoisseur of enlightened pornography. Unfortunately, "in the tradition of" does not mean "comparable to." Steinke gives us the life of Jesse, a woman who is, as she says, "attracted to people who make me feel inadequate." Her lover, Bell, is obsessed with a former schoolmate he hasn't seen in ten years. She realizes she's falling into the same routine to try and keep him interested that her mother used to do the same with her father, but is unable to break the cycle, just sit and watch it in a kind of disinterested existential horror. Such might be refreshing to someone who's never read a book of its ilk before, and to be fair, upon its publication ten years ago the dysfunctional-main-character novel had not become nearly as prevalent a theme as it is now. But it certainly doesn't rouse like Bataille or Duras does, and Steinke doesn't have the chops to pull off the world-weary existential crisis the way someone like Kathe Koja does. Even her sex scenes have the same detached feel. Duras used the mechanism, but created feeling in the reader underneath with pacing, sentence structure, and word choice, all things of which she was a master; none are in evidence here. Not worth the time. (zero)
Rating: 
Summary: Good prose, but spotty
Review: Darcy Steinke, Suicide Blonde (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992) `ware the media event-book, film, whatever it may be-that is presented as something "in the tradition of." Robert Olmstead says on the back cover of Steinke's second novel that it is in the tradition of Djuna Barnes, Georges Bataille, and Marguerite Duras; certainly the kind of recommendationt hat is going to get under the skin of any connoisseur of enlightened pornography. Unfortunately, "in the tradition of" does not mean "comparable to." Steinke gives us the life of Jesse, a woman who is, as she says, "attracted to people who make me feel inadequate." Her lover, Bell, is obsessed with a former schoolmate he hasn't seen in ten years. She realizes she's falling into the same routine to try and keep him interested that her mother used to do the same with her father, but is unable to break the cycle, just sit and watch it in a kind of disinterested existential horror. Such might be refreshing to someone who's never read a book of its ilk before, and to be fair, upon its publication ten years ago the dysfunctional-main-character novel had not become nearly as prevalent a theme as it is now. But it certainly doesn't rouse like Bataille or Duras does, and Steinke doesn't have the chops to pull off the world-weary existential crisis the way someone like Kathe Koja does. Even her sex scenes have the same detached feel. Duras used the mechanism, but created feeling in the reader underneath with pacing, sentence structure, and word choice, all things of which she was a master; none are in evidence here. Not worth the time. (zero)
Rating:
Summary: Big disappointment
Review: First of all, if I ever had to decide whether I'd read one of Steinke's books based on the first sentence alone, I'd pass them up. They either seem uncomfortable, as though she'd mulled over them for a good while (much like Snoopy), or as though she's out to shock, which is simply boring. Maybe that's why I was so disappointed in _Suicide Blonde_, especially after the way it was built up in so many reviews, and after having been pleased with her other book, _Jesus Saves_.
I realized _JS_ was pretty bleak as I was reading it, but there was something redeeming in Steinke's prose and her wonderful insights into human character, and it stuck with me afterwards. Perhaps I could relate to Ginger's feeling helpless and a victim of her surroundings, but I never got the feeling she was out to destroy herself. Jesse, on the other hand, is a character I could never relate to. No matter how down I've ever felt, I've never sensed a solution in whoring myself. I simply didn't get it at all. Damn, this book was a waste of a few evenings.
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Summary: Suicide Blonde will nevertheless be labeled literature
Review: First, off I agree wholeheartedly with nprince. However, as a refutation to the other reviews displayed on this page, Suicide Blonde is not meant to give you salvation. That is salvation from confusion or disorder. It is descriptive, not normarive. Judgements and values remain well embedded in the message but they in no way offer any help or insight to a reader, other than the comfort of anothers' complicated story. Furthurmore, the shallowness of these characters are intentional. They are well constructed but, regardless, have nothing to do with the story! They are insignificant in so far as they are the basic, general components that comprise the trials that every person has to face at some time or another. This story is about one person and one person only. And like all art, like Shakespeare, the culmination of all these components together, in relation to the protaganist, the leave readers to fend fend for themselves when all is said and done. If you can't handle the aftermath then seek other means of assistance. Otherwise DO NOT try to make this book conform to you're hopes and expectations. It will always fall into that big abominal void of falling short. In the meantime, respect a creative genius at work and admire the portrayal of how things can be.
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