LAST LAST CHANCE
By Fiona Maazel
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 337 pages, $25

Lucy Clark is a 30-year-old drug addict (downers, mostly) who grew up in a 7,000-square-foot New York City apartment, whose father killed himself after a deadly strain of plague disappeared from his lab under mysterious circumstances, whose mother is a crackhead, whose precocious 12-year-old half-sister is obsessed with plague and whose grandmother, Agneth, is convinced that reincarnation is possible and that she, indeed, has lived before. There’s also a best friend who married the only man Lucy ever truly loved, as well as Lucy’s current boyfriend, Stanley, an alcoholic seeking a uterus for his dead wife’s frozen eggs, and a host of other characters who make Fiona Maazel’s debut novel Last Last Chance alternately entertaining and frustrating.  read more »