Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… a clerk at a Retail Rodeo, a desperately bleak Wal Mart-esque shop. The store is populated by sleepwalking shoppers, jaded teenagers, and Bible-thumping employees. Justine spends her days in the hellishly boring shop only to come home to her channel-flipping, beer-guzzling husband, Phil, who seems to spend more time smoking pot than working. In the midst of this drudgery, she takes a shine to the new checkout boy, a gloomy type who reads Catcher in the Rye and calls himself Holden.
Personality… downtrodden, bored, and unhappy. Justine is constantly in a funk: “I used to, y’know, lie in bed and imagine other cities, other jobs I could have. Other husbands. I don’t even know what to imagine anymore.” Justine isn’t content with her life, but she doesn’t quite know what to do about it.
Get to Know her in...
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A discount store clerk strikes up an affair with a stock boy who considers himself the incarnation of Holden Caulfield.
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EVER SINCE HER brother Mark’s accidental death, 15-year-old Lindsey has become the good girl—good daughter, good friend, good student. She places everyone’s needs before her own. Secretly, though, she’s frustrated by her family’s silence about Mark; she wishes she had the nerve to tell off one of her so-called best friends, a queen bee who wants the new boy at school for herself; and she longs to ditch obligations that prevent her from starring in the school musical. But instead of speaking her mind, Lindsey does something else . . . she starts to steal—and immediately wonders how good she really is.
All the pressure to be what others expect fuels Lindsey’s impulse to take things. Each time the risk becomes greater, and each time she thinks she’ll be caught. Wants to be caught. And then, finally, she is. . . .
From the Hardcover edition.
