In the future, as Manhattan descends into chaos and poverty threatens her family, twelve-year-old Lola Hart is forced to trade her past life of privilege for life in Harlem, where she begins a terrible metamorphosis. 20,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo. New York City in the near future: open warfare rages in Brooklyn, smoke from an unspecified toxic disaster fills the sky above Long Island, troops patrol Harlem streets, tuberculosis is rampant, inflation is zooming, and youth gangs rampage through the streets. Nationally, the situation is even worse; presidents are murdered within months of taking office, and riots are wrecking most of the major cities. This is the world of Lola Hart as recorded in a diary she receives on her 12th birthday. The mutating language of her diary reflects her own metamorphosis from prissy private school girl to murdering gangsta poised to disappear into the netherworld of New York's deadliest gang. P.K. Dick Award-winning novelist Womack's (Elvissey, Tor Bks., 1992) apocalyptic vision crackles with intensity, made more memorable by its controlling voice, as original as Alex's in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange or Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. In previous novels, including the Philip K. Dick award-winning Elvissey , Womack has shown himself a master of invented idiom and stylish, Joycean wordplay. Now in perhaps the most brilliant display of his linguistic talents, he steps into the mind of an adolescent girl of future Manhattan through the medium of her intensely personal daily diary. Lola Hart begins her record on the eve of her twelfth birthday. She chronicles a comfortable life with family in a Park Avenue apartment, and with friends at a nearby private school. Amid surrounding urban and national climates of escalating violence and social decay, Lola watches and worries as both parents lose their jobs, her little sister becomes catatonic, and her friends alienated. Forced to move into seedy Harlem-area lodgings, Lola soon adopts the language and values of a local street gang. Womack's uncompromising prose creates a starkly realistic portrait of one teenager's all-too-common seduction into gang life. Less science fiction than a sobering forecast based on current, violent trends. Carl Hays A young girl's diary presents a rioting vision of near- future Manhattan. Twelve-year-old Lola Hart, her sister, Boob, and their perfectly loving parents live on the Upper East Side. Daddy's a failing scriptwriter; Mommy's an unemployed professor; the girls go to private school. Lola begins a diary in February on a note of barely perceived alarm, as several schoolmates contract TB and the smoke and ash from uprisings in Brooklyn and Queens loom over Park Avenue. Something awful is happening out there, but her parents shield her from it. Finally her father's Hollywood work dries up in a nose-diving economy, and the family has to move to the bottom edge of West Harlem. Amid these crises, Lola discovers she likes girls; the rioting worsens; and ``Operation Domestic Storm,'' in which the army, national guard, and local police create martial law, shifts into full gear. Lola makes friends with some black and Puerto Rican girls from her new neighborhood, and they induct her by degrees into their gang, the Death Angels. In a matter of months, as the diary progresses, further violence and family misfortune sharpen and harden Lola. Womack (Elvissey, 1992, etc.) is at his best when Lola is at her toughest: Her good-girl voice, filled with innocent dread, gradually mutates into a kind of terrordome-speak, a lingo that mixes hip-hop cadences and linguistic neologisms on the order of A Clockwork Orange: ``Me and Mama rode back lipstilled the whole way. She vizzed sad like I know I do but nothing was sayable so I hushed and just remembered Boob like I knew her back when we homed in our old place.'' Womack's idea of the near future moves at a gallop: In six months, two presidents are assassinated, the money system changes, and all of Manhattan takes up arms. Womack gets high on violence the way Ballard and Burroughs do: with sickened brio. Tense, knowing, and ambitious, this novel gets New York's class system right as it creates a language informed by every kind of contemporary American extremism. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Used Book in Good Condition