What do readers think of Lola by Melissa Scrivner Love? Write your own review.

The book was fast-paced and at times, suspenseful. The main character in the story evokes sympathy and pity but at the same time, dislike.

Perhaps my reaction to the book was ignorance in a lifestyle that is very foreign to what I know. I was disappointed in the book because of the writing style, and the need to keep the narrator or descriptors beyond the character voices in the same rough and crude vernacular, in what was possibly the author's intent to make the story more dramatically realistic. The timeline of the story was at times confusing. I had to go back and reread sections to make sure I didn't miss something. I thought the main character was flawed and not believable. The racial and sexist references in the book, woven through the story as an attempt to legitimize the main characters' behavior, seemed overdone.

Stieg Larsson changed the way readers view female sleuths when he introduced the unforgettable Lisbeth Salander. More recently Taylor Stevens follows the model with her character Vanessa Michael Munroe, motorcycle rider and world-traveling mercenary. These hardnosed anti-heroines are damaged, tough, practical, smart, and, yes, admirable. Unfortunately Melissa Scrivener Love's character Lola (also the title of the novel) doesn't quite measure up. Growing up in Huntington Park Los Angeles with a drug-addicted mother, Lola necessarily learns survival skills early. By virtue of her ability to kill swiftly and unsuspectingly, she becomes the de facto head of a small-time barrio gang. But in the end Lola is trapped by her ghetto mentality. I wanted to admire Lola's qualities—her street smarts, her protection of young Lucy, her ability to thrive within her environment. Yet I left the novel knowing that although Lola's skills enabled her to survive the rough streets of Huntington Park, she would not persevere in the larger world.