Tapping the power of punk

After 50 years, rock 'n' roll still maintains a messianic hold on a great many of us: It makes us move, shapes our identities, infects our souls. We hand ourselves over to it, drawing upon its melodic force to push us past life's dead ends. Those three-minute bursts of music can serve as our tickets out of the Nowheresvilles of our formative years, giving us the confidence to move forward and embrace the great unknown.

Stephanie Kuehnert found her own personal Jesus in the early 1990s. "The first time I heard Courtney Love scream that she was 'pretty on the inside,' it saved my angry, thirteen-year-old girl soul," the author explains in the foreword to her jagged-edged debut novel, "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone." Kuehnert, 28, grew up in the era of Nirvana and Riot Grrrls, a time when punk "broke" after more than a dozen years of bubbling under the cultural radar. Suffice to say, there's no groovin' on a Sunday afternoon on these pages.

In "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" (named after the 1996 track by female punk trio Sleater-Kinney), Kuehnert taps the energy of punk to fuel her blunt prose. It's an empowering new twist on a girl's coming of age, replete with the true-to-life struggle of commercial hand-wringing versus angsty art.

The author clearly understands the pitch-black flip side of rock's transformative power. The music can save you, but it can just as easily break your heart, or much, much worse. At first, Emily Black is just another angry small-town teen raised on rock: "Music was in my blood," she declares by way of introduction. It was a bloodline she shared with both parents, who met at River's Edge, a warehouse on the outskirts of Carlisle, Wis. Dad was onstage with a guitar; Mom was in the crowd. However, soon after Emily's birth, her mother, Louisa, flies the coop, leaving Emily to be raised by her father, Michael. The reason Louisa leaves? To follow the music, according to Dad. "She had smiled at us and kissed us good-bye and said it was time to meet Iggy and Joey and Patti," Emily says.

An ugly truth

But the truth, we learn, is far less romantic: While still in high school, Louisa was raped by her boyfriend, whom she shot and killed in self-defense. Though no one suspected her guilt in the killing, Louisa was tormented by her actions.