Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life

Wonderfully communicates a young woman's experience living as a runaway street urchin in 1980s Europe. The writing is funny, brave and unfiltered, the drawings capture the manic highs and lows of youth with a sort of elegantly messy quality. Three and a half stars.

Wonderfully communicates a young woman's experience living as a runaway street urchin in 1980s Europe. The writing is funny, brave and unfiltered, the drawings capture the manic highs and lows of youth with a sort of elegantly messy quality. Three and a half stars.

(3.5)

Discarded hypothetical openers for a review that never materialized:

When you're 17 sometimes you make bad decisions.

Sometimes when you're young, your 'friends' aren't really your friends.

Many men are predators operating under a flawed sense of entitlement; in this case, Italian men; more specifically, Sicilian men.

Traveling in Italy is dangerous for young women with no money and no identification.

Heroin is bad.

Not all punks are good, or bad, but most are misunderstood in some way(s).

Selfish, narcissistic people make poor travelling companions.

Youthful naivete is trampled, encrusted by fear and distrust.

(It is a frustrating read, sometimes infuriating, rarely enjoyable, yet strong in its truth.)

Seems like I've been saying this a lot lately, but I think I would have enjoyed this more when I was younger. In all honesty, I read a little over half, but I got fed up with her making the same mistakes over and over and OVER again and skimmed the rest. I'm not sure that I missed much. I'm sorry she went through what she did, and I hope she found better friends later in life. I've never been to Italy, but this definitely reinforces all the worst stories about how Italian men behave.

In 1984, rebellious, 17-year-old, punked-out Ulli Lust sets out from Vienna with a companion for a wild hitchhiking trip across Italy, from Naples through Verona and Rome and ending up in Sicily. Ulli's journey turns to some very dark, scary places. An honest, raw, graphic memoir, thoughtful and compellingly told.

I’m too old to find the antics of two rebel girls hitchhiking to Italy and trading sex for money anything but worrisome. Did not finish.

Pretty darn good.