A drug and boozed soaked evening leads to an inevitable tragedy and just like that we’re following Bebe’s adventures in post-rehab halfway house land with a side of beauty school fumes. I really didn’t want to like Bebe Baker but she made it impossible for me to stay angry with her. Besides I’m a sucker for a good “I’ve hit rock bottom” story and the inevitable feelings that tag along with a read like this which are generally of the “my life is looking pretty good right now” variety.

The characters Bebe befriends in Serenity house are fantastically unconscious about flying their freak flags. There’s Jake, the schizophrenic who believes he’s Jesus, Buck, real name Becky and self-defined “Republican Dyke from Alabama” and all-around super sweetheart (honestly I kept picturing Toni Colette’s character from The United States of Tara) and Violet, goth girl and self-mutilator who is known to sport her mother’s official Snow White Disneyland costume on occasion. Group therapy never gets old with this crew.

When Bebe isn’t stealing her house-mate’s peanut butter by the spoonful in midnight snack binges (a girl after my own heart) she’s listing her diagnosed initials in a litany like manner: ADD, MDD, CD, PTSD (aka Attention Deficit Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Chemical Dependency, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder respectively). If that isn’t enough she’s also coasting on fumes towards beauty school graduation (528 hours down. 72 hours left to go) and still has fifteen wet sets to create before she completes the required two-hundred hairdos.

Bebe is a mess but somehow Jillian Lauren makes you love her, root for her to succeed and grip the book just a bit more tightly when she starts to slip.  At times I wished that I could physically drag Bebe towards the right path — the one that would finally get her to San Francisco and the fresh start she wished for and frankly deserved. In my imagination I frantically stood on the sideline waving her toward the Yellow Brick road, but honestly I felt a little guilty for not warning her that it’s always 66 degrees here and at least in LA you can be ADD, MDD, SD, and PTSD with a tan.