Generation Dementia
by Michael Hartnett
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Pub Date 1 Oct 2015 | Archive Date 28 Sep 2016
Description
They line up in Frick Village to get on the garbage truck: the disoriented, the suicidal, the desperate, even the kid who won't look up from her cell phone. They are Generation Dementia, high school seniors who have lost their bearings. When a video made about the troubled teens on the garbage truck goes viral, the reality TV crews come around to repackage Generation Dementia and the trash they haul. Narrator Hash O'Connell rebels against this makeover and soon finds he and his friends are confronted with a darker underside of both his community and the cameras now framing it. Hash unearths disturbing secrets about twenty years of lost trash and the lurid tales buried with that refuse. Ultimately, Hash encounters the corruptions off Frick's past, revelations that will transform his understanding of his family's legacy and allow him to emerge from the rubble he has inherited.
A Note From the Publisher
Booksellers - To order this title with discount and returnability, please use Ingram or contact the Black Rose Writing Sales Team, sales@blackrosewriting.com.
Advance Praise
“You’ll love the ride of this funny and fast-paced story about the conflicts faced by Hash O’Connell and his friends as they travel by garbage truck through reality and virtual reality.” – Joseph Gansrow, author of Deconstructing and Reconstructing Sentences
“Hartnett artfully shows us the only truly non-disposable thing in our society is our garbage. It’s an enjoyable and perceptive read from beginning to end.” – Alfred P. Doblin, The Record, New Jersey
Available Editions
| EDITION | Ebook |
| ISBN | 9781612965925 |
| PRICE | US$18.95 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Kim C, Educator
Generation Dementia is not easy to classify. Is it a mystery? Is it coming-of-age story? I think I will leave the classification to others and just say that I really enjoyed this book. It’s a surprisingly complicated story and gets better as each layer is peeled away.
The high school in Frick Village has a counselor with an idea. He wants the graduating seniors to get a taste of the real world before college and help them see the possibilities out there. His idea? Have the teens make the early morning garbage pickup runs in the village. He recruits some students, each with a unique set of problems, but none of them truly troubled in the usual sense of the word.
One of them, Hash, is a young man whose mother has died and left him all alone in his big house, ostensibly with an aunt, who actually lives in Florida and checks in with him monthly via text message. The other teen is Louie, who seems to enjoy the work so much that he tries to toss just about anything he can reach into the trash compactor, including lawn ornaments, cement lions, and more. Lee Lee is the third teen. She is an overachieving, brilliant girl who plays violin. The three of them make daily trash runs, with Lee Lee playing violin and the young men heaving the pails into the compactor. Hash has a habit of grabbing interesting bits out of the trash, which he hauls home and turns into odd sculpture pieces.
The town’s mayor is corrupt and keeps trying to shut down the program, using such means as turning it into a reality TV series. The mayor has been data mining the residents for many years and making a ton of money in the process. Meanwhile, Hash and his friend, Eva, are investigating the disappearance of 20 years of the town’s trash. Hash has found a set of old floppy disks in the trash, which he reads and learns about, not only the town, but his own family. The story sounds incredibly complicated, but it comes together nicely.
The flow of the story was mostly steady, with few times when I thought it could have gone faster. The characters were developed enough, with Hash being the most complex character with the most background information provided to the reader. He grows as an individual as he uncovers more and more secrets and learns more about his family history. The other characters are not as well-developed because they don’t play as central a role in the story. The subplot of the investigation was quite interesting. I hoped that there would be more said about the resolution of that.
All in all, this was a good story that held my interest for many pages, and what good is a book if it doesn’t do that? I recommend it to fans of mystery, general fiction, and technology.
