EBOOK
About
Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraqueñan and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. As Easter break approaches, Eugenia agrees to go on a spontaneous road trip with her rebellious classmate Luis Tévez. Together they embark on a four-day, 400-mile journey from Caracas to Mérida in a banged-up Fiat, in search of Eugenia's grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. This is the setting in which a tentative but troubled romance begins. The story unfolds against Venezuela's "lost decade" of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that paved the way for the reign of Hugo Chávez. With an unvarnished fluidity that brings to mind Jack Kerouac and a crazy-ass playlist that ranges from REM to Bob Dylan to El Canto del Loco to Shakira, Blue Label is an audacious, dark coming-of-age novel with a gut-punch of an emotional ending. It's the prize-winning first book by a writer who has cemented his reputation as a major young Latin American voice.
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Reviews
"A high-octane experience, an irreverent assault on the senses that breaks conventions."
Federico Vegas, El Nacional
"Like the verbal equivalent of a good whisky, Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles's novel should be savored with an urgency that evokes calmness, read in small sips to avoid wasting any of it, the consummate narrative. All that remains is to put your hands on a copy, raise it like a glass, and drink it down to the last drop."
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón
"Sánchez Rugeles has created an uninhibited, adolescent female voice, a character who not only narrates but also provides a rich, raw speech map from a segment of Venezuelan youth."
Alberto Barrera Tyszka, from the afterword