Harare Review of Books

240 pages.

First published in September 2022.

Genre: Fiction.

Thank you to Edelweiss and to The Overlook Press for this DRC.

A Cigarette Lit Backwards is the story of a young woman, Kat, coming of age in North Carolina in the early 2000s. She is involved in the local punk scene, and is trying to find herself in the midst of various influences: school, her punk scene friends, the many boys she likes, drugs, her piano teacher (she’s trying to get into an arts school), and her immigrant parents.

This novel is quietly devastating, and the author’s decision to write in the first person brilliant. Three-quarters of the way through the book, I was still fairly sure it wasn’t for me; but by the end, I knew it would stick.

I ached for Kat as her life went off the rails. Her struggles, while very specific, were very relatable, and the author managed the magic trick of taking me back to my teen years. Who doesn’t remember that deep longing for acceptance, and all the crazy things you did to get it? The endless crushes? How devastating everything was, no matter how insignificant in the greater scheme of things? How your teen brain came up with blindingly perfect solutions to things, only they really weren’t? Kat goes through it all.

I’ve come away from this book wondering how we even make it into adulthood intact. The pressures of those teen years are horribly intense, and it’s amazing that we survive. In this novel, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic shows how high the stakes truly are, and how the decisions we make in those bewildering years can have lasting consequences.

CW: Drug use, sexual abuse