spuytenduyvil

If you take a real crime, the Jennifer Moore murder, add the imagination, insight and humanity of Stephanie Dickinson, you have Love Highway. It’s as if Stephanie not only has access to diaries of real characters, but to their actual thought processes. Despite knowing the outcome, it’s suspenseful and reads as if it’s happening in real time. Halfway through I had to put the book down for a while—it felt too real, too harrowing, although not at all gory. And after putting it down it still stuck to me. Her fictionalization, based on the actual, realizes its emotional truth. Be forewarned, you can’t swallow this book, it’s too powerful. Like all truly great art, you’ve got to let it swallow you.

                  Ted Jonathan, author of Bones & Jokes

 

In order to know love, we must know its absence. This duality sets the stage of Stephanie Dickinson’s potent new novel, Love Highway. Nylah is smart but naïve, capable but insecure. She is drunk. She is being followed. Trinity is downtrodden but hopeful, distracted but street-smart. She is trapped. She is caught in the middle. These two women, love-injured and longing, are fading into the same gritty gray scenery. Their cravings are drawn with precise, cutting lines that pierce the vibrancy of love itself—bold, scenic and memorable. Love Highway is about those who feed on others’ hunger and the value of looking within, no matter how painful.

                  Jen Knox, author of Don’t Tease the Elephants

 

Love Highway by Stephanie Dickinson is a sensual and treacherous novel about desire and memory.  Set in New York City and its outskirts, she gives us the shiny girls who will risk everything to be part of what they’ve been brainwashed into believing is bright and essential.  Dickinson has a dense, lyrical prose style that infiltrates the senses like a walk through a hot-house full of lilies.  In turns both exciting and shattering, this story unfolds silken with the worms still working the cloth.

                  Susan Tepper, author of The Merrill Diaries