As soon as I started hearing the buzz (no pun intended) about this book, I was intrigued, but I'll be honest - I didn't want to like it. I wanted to read it and deem Zailckas, who's in her mid-twenties, a 'promising up-and-comer' detailing her life as a young alcoholic.

But I couldn't put the book down from the moment I cracked the spine ... Zailckas not only has a way with words that straddles a fine line between colloquial prose and high-brow literature, but she's also painfully honest and thorough with the accounts of her own struggles with alcohol.

She's also accurate. Not all who drink excessively are alcoholics, and our society is too quick to place diagnostic labels on the behaviors of others. Rather, she points out that she may have been on the road to alcoholism, but, like many young women, was abusing, drinking for the wrong reasons, and getting into situations that otherwise would not have happened.

Still, the line between risky behavior and disease is a thin line that too many people tread, and Zailckas seems to feel a sort of need to drive this point home. Moments of happy drunkenness in herself and others are recalled with the same disdain and regret as dangerous, major events such as a blackout in her teen years, or her trend of driving home from ther bars in college.

Given the subject matter, this is forgiveable, but it at times seemed to suggest that from 14 to 22, Zailckas was engaging in nothing but destructive behavior ... and as a writer in her twenties with a best-selling memoir already on the shelves, this can't possibly be entirely the case. Adding a few more of her successes might have better illustrated how much she had to lose.

Still, it's a cautionary tale that is told without preachiness, and it's an entertaining read that, at points, made me suck in my breath and say 'ugh, I've done that,' or, conversely, 'thank God that never happened to me.'

Many young women face the same trials of life while drinking, and Zailckas has struck a chord with Smashed.

Learn more about this author, Jaclyn C. Stevenson.
Click here to send author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about Book reviews: Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, by Koren Zailckas?
We want to hear your view. Write now!