SOHO PRESS, 2014
Greenwich Village, 1970s. Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal lives with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality, in a once-elegant, now decaying brownstone. Her mother has abandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father’s best friend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build a substitute family. She’s a rebel, even a criminal, but she’s also deeply vulnerable, struggling to learn how to be an artist and a woman in a broken world. Rainey Royal is told in fourteen narratives that build into a fiercely powerful novel.
“[Rainey is] achingly vulnerable and cruelly intimidating…that in-your-face mix of fear and fearlessness, carnality, control and powerlessness that is what it sometimes takes to survive as a female in America…But Landis never lets you forget who the true victim is. In a world where the adults behave at best like wrinkled spoiled children and at worst like criminals, there’s no one more lost and vulnerable than this raging, magnificent, abandoned little girl, who manages by persistence to grow up.”
“A mesmerizing portrait of a teenager in 1970s Greenwich Village. Rainey Royal’s life is wantonly glamorous, degenerate, sophisticated . . . [Landis] has created a kind of scandalous beauty in her tale of the simultaneously fierce and vulnerable Rainey.”
“Rainey Royal is the empowering story of an abandoned fourteen-year-old girl desperately trying to find herself, as an individual and an artist. [Rainey is a] vulnerable, criminal rebel.”
“Rainey will remain in my mind forever as one of my favorite characters.”
“Wild, dangerous, sometimes certain and other times totally lost, Rainey is a fascinating, unique character…The young women, even as lifelong friends, seem to be in a constantly shifting battle for power; under the surface it often is connected to secrets and knowledge.”
“It’s difficult to remember a novel that was more continually on edge than Rainey Royal, a series of fraught moments that never seem to let off any psychic steam…so taut, the scenes so emotionally charged, that the breaks in the action are welcome…beautifully drawn.”
“Fiery, daring, unforgettable…Landis knows bad girls—how their minds work, how they are made, and why they are broken. Best of all, she knows how to make you love them—which you can’t help but do as you follow Rainey Royal, the title character, through her 1970s Greenwich Village girlhood. Rainey is dangerous, but her struggles are timeless, and Landis writes about her with prose so elegant and crystalline that as you read, you have to remind yourself to breathe.”
“Transporting, sensual and musical by turns, appropriately enough for a book about sex and jazz.”
“Landis creates a vivid fictive universe…every battle, every transgression is minutely observed…line by line, one of the smartest and most exacting prose stylists we have.”
“[Rainey Royal is] always pushing the moment further, even when part of her feels like backing down, and the result is a story that feels dangerous—as though something might break at any moment.”
“Hard to handle, Rainey thinks. That’s what they say when they talk about me.” The book isn’t hard to handle—it’s a fast read that consumes the reader from beginning to end—but Rainey’s experiences are. Landis takes the time to turn Rainey inside out, revealing the dark underbelly of female adolescence.”
“Might make you cringe—whether you were the kind of girl who had a ball thrown at your face during gym or the kind of threw it…As Rainey moves into young adulthood, her sexuality becomes so complicated, it’s like a second character in the book. There is power there, she learns, but it’s the power of electricity with faulty wiring; lights aglow; the house in flames.”
“[Rainey, Leah, and Tina] psychologically torment one another but remain inseparable, and exude cool that masks their vulnerability. Landis depicts a 1970s New York City that is a permissive playground and menacing nightmare.”
“Tremendous…Landis offers a bold alternative of which I hope we see more and more: the novel as feat of compression…Crisp, beautiful, often hilarious.”
“Stark and fascinating…unforgettable…The hundreds of little tragedies painted across the page will leave readers deeply affected as Landis perfectly captures a time period of mad exploration during which lines blurred for young people trying to find themselves.”
“Blew me away…an amazing character.”
“[Rainey Royal] deals in short, sharp shocks . . . [with] a language of the imaginative and beating heart . . . [Landis] weaves spells.”
“Rainey Royal is a story about loss and recovery by any means necessary . . . It is a brave book, a provocative book, a book that invites re-reading and discussions as intense as the world it portrays.”
“Rainey Royal is a tough novel with a tender heart…Dylan Landis is an author to be watched.”
“Brilliant, delicate writing…a solid choice for literary fiction readers; it also will be appreciated by those who are interested in narratives that depict the bohemian lifestyle.”
“Beautiful, richly drawn characters will pull readers into this emotionally charged story and keep them clinging to every lyrical word. Landis’s captivating first novel is a ringing tribute to friendship, autonomy, and artistic presence.”
“Every woman has known a Rainey Royal. The coolest girl in school, the most daring, the most beautiful, yet the one who could turn on you—and then, bewilderingly, turn back. What makes a Rainey Royal, and her effect on everyone she encounters—that chaos of yearning, cruelty, woundedness, seeking, and human poetry—we needed a great writer to show us, and here she is. Dylan Landis has written a spare, elegant novel that’s pure nerves, pure adrenaline. Should carry a warning, do not read at bedtime.”
“Landis’s gorgeous, off-handedly elegant style caught me from the first page. I didn’t so much read Rainey Royal as I was hypnotized by it.”
“Beautiful, brutal, mesmerizing, Rainey Royal draws you in from the first, breathtaking sentence and doesn’t let you go. Few novels have affected me as this one did. Reminiscent, at times, of Mary Gaitskill and Lorrie Moore, this is a novel—and a character—for the ages. Read it now.”
“Dylan Landis is a writer of exceptional rigor and finesse. Every page of Rainey Royal is incandescent—practically ablaze—with the beauty and chaos of adolescence, heartache, art and New York City. I don’t know how she does it, but I hope she never stops.”
“There is a line in Dylan Landis’s lush, fierce, and stunning novel Rainey Royal, that perfectly captures this book’s intense beauty. ‘Rainey feels half like a butterfly has landed on her wrist and half like a knife is angled to her neck.’ Rainey Royal is a chronicle of girlhood as a dangerous, delicate thing. There is edge and tenderness and longing to be found here. Always, though, Landis’s words are a butterfly and a knife both cutting you open in necessary ways.”
“One need only consider some of the ingredients of this flammable dessert of a novel—art, jazz, sex, cigs, saints and miracles and dangerous modern school girls without parental brakes—to know that Rainey Royal, Dylan Landis’s terrifically entertaining novel, is not just for adults. Younger readers will be equally smitten with Rainey Royal, a hardier, funnier successor to Holden Caulfield.”
“Do not pick up Dylan Landis’ fire-hearted novel if you have any need for sleep, because this intense, passionate ride though turbulent girlhood will not let go of your throat until you have followed Rainey, Tina and Leah to the complex end. Evocative of literary coming-of-age classics like Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, yet with the modern edge of Lena Dunham’s Girls, Rainey Royal explores the underbelly of art, glamour, jazz, sainthood, magnetism, the 1970s, sex, and what it means to burn.”
“Dylan Landis knows how to unnerve a reader, even as she’s appreciating being unnerved. Rainey Royal thrums with sex and power. A brave, exquisite book.”
“Rainey Royal gets under your skin, pushes you out of your comfort zone, and takes you to a truer, more frightening place. Dylan Landis captures the innocence and cruelty of teenage girls in flamey, jewel-like sentences that hover on the edge of rapture: read these stories with your heart in your throat.”
“Deeply human. Surprisingly tender. Pure poetry.”
“Landis offers a rich, sometimes challenging portrait of young women doing their best to grow in the absence of positive role models.”
“Prose is a fine art in the hands of Dylan Landis… Rainey Royal is yet another example of her lapidary fiction and her unsettling imagination.”
“Rainey Royal is the most exquisite combination of tender and terrifying, of girls who walk delicate and angry balances between their love for each other and their need for survival, of a New York not vanished but remembered here in all brownstone and hot streets and threads of music, of young women navigating love and the selfish desires which are not love.”