Laila Russell is an ordinary 15-year-old schoolgirl living in London with her father, who is morose over his wife's accidental death. In the spring of 1972, Laila spots a lost pocketbook on the Underground and returns it to Amanda Charles, a fashionable young woman employed by an aging rock star. With glam music on the rise, Chaz Bonapart is going out of style. His manager, Francis Guy, comes up with a plan to get him back in the game by feeding him song ideas that teens would respond to, and he enlists Laila to be his secret weapon. Thrust into a new world at an age that awakens sexual desire, Laila develops crushes on Amanda and a handsome friend of hers. Encounters with an American store clerk, a vicious skinhead and an eccentric artist further expand her horizons. Amanda tries to manipulate Laila into a doomed romance as a perverse form of inspiration, but Laila finds her own source of clever song ideas, and Chaz begins having hits with them. As he recognizes Laila's own potential, Frank plots to make her his star client. The second part of the story finds Laila a has-been no longer certain who she is. She is crushed by a discovery about her mother and threatened by an old nemesis. But when she becomes a victim of shocking violence, it's from a completely unexpected source.

Marc Bolan Killed in Crash

In his first novel, veteran music journalist Ira Robbins satirizes the foibles and fanaticism of '60s radicalism. The dark humor of Kick It Till It Breaks is tempered by affection and respect for those who devoted themselves to ending the war in Viet Nam. Ydinia Ochreman is the leader of the Plumbers, a pre-Watergate organization engaged in watery terrorism; her travels and exploits shape the story, which involves a colorful cast of dubious characters, including the incompetent FBI agent on her trail, a pacifist protest leader with a complicated agenda, a cranky peg-legged bar owner, an Irish atheist on a quest to end organized religion whose son kills people for it and a confused loser from Memphis who gets lost in London and finally finds a way to live. Rich with period detail, slang and settings, Kick It Till It Breaks is both a fond epic of long-ago times and a stick in the eye of anyone with too idealized a recollection of the era.

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