I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex (Switchblade)

By Summer Brenner

Anya is the victim of a deep deception: someone lied to her and as a result she is kept under lock and key, used by her employer to service men, and indebted for the privilege. In exchange, she lives in the US, dreaming of American freedom. Much of I-5 transpires on the eponymous interstate. Anya travels with her manager and driver from LA to Oakland, in a brutal journey which incorporates a visit to a correctional facility and a rendevouz with an organ grinder.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1604860197
• ISBN13: 9781604860191
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: PM Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.5" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

This I-5 is a far cry from John Muir's Golden Valley. Welcome to the Real.

I loved the vignette quality of this book, cinematic and tactile. While some passages are quite graphic, the whole travels like a heavy ferryboat over a glassy sea: the drip drip of great story-telling with nothing spared but nothing spare. Anya's ethereal foreign-ness is Candide-like and yet tough. The prison stop hysterical. This is a terrific book for smart people who think they know a lot. You don't.

I-5

A great book. By turns provocative, poignant, ironic, suspenseful. Ms. Brenner walks the dark side with beautiful insight. Francoise Beltran New York

What Makes a Page Turner

I'm not really sure what makes a page turner-- it is a mystery to me but I know one when I read one, and I was quite taken up by this book! Anya feels totally believable-- this is not a sentimental portrait (as it could have easily become) for she is a complex survivor, tricked into sexual slavery. The sex scene that sticks in my mind is still vivid, but not meant to provoke-- she is doing a job, and the details are gritty, and the writing is clipped, like the sound of high heels on rough cement. Where will she take us?

Elegant and refined prose beautifully unravels a difficult theme

A beautifully written story. Brenner has an elegant and refined voice, encompassing deep observation, wonderful ironies, and heartfelt characters. I could sense, see and feel all of the characters, and I loved the details that captured them: Marty's gums, Pedro's tarantula arms, Mohammed's salty romanticism, Anya's love of waffles.I appreciated the streaks of humor and irony, and the depth of Brenner's observations: "Dying is the only thing that makes one man equal to another." But I was really impressed by her restraint, because in choosing not to sensationalize the sex and violence in order to inflame her readers about the damages inherent in the sex industry, her delicate treatment of the material let us feel the despair, the outrage, the hopelessness intrinsic to this difficult issue in our own way.

A riveting tale of a new kind of Heroine

The tale of Anya is instantly engaging and startling. The novel brings to life a seedy underworld that exists all around us. Brenner shines the light on the underworld of human sex trafficking by utilizing the brightness of her main character, the at once strong, weak and real Anya. I could not put this novel down, engaging, exciting, entertaining, but at the same time thought provoking. A+