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Katja from the Punk Band

de Simon Logan

Sèrie: Katja From the Punk Band (book 1)

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Katja, like everyone else stuck on the work island they call home, wants to get to the mainland by any means necessary. Shooting her boyfriend and stealing a chemical vial is one way to ensure her safe passage; the only problem is, she's not the only one who wants it, and the freedom it will bring. There's Nikolai the joystick junkie; Aleksakhina, Katja's parole officer; Vladimir Kohl, the small-time chemical dealer, and his boss Szerynski; the rival chemical lord Dracyev, and his lover, Ylena. And there's the Man In Red, ready and waiting for whoever is (un)lucky enough to end up with the vial. Katja from the Punk Band is Jackie Brown meets the Sex Pistols, a fast-paced industrial crime-thriller that weaves multiple storylines and timeframes, from the author of Pretty Little Things to Fill Up The Void, Nothing Is Inflammable, and I-O.… (més)
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Katja from the Punk Band by Simon Logan is the introductory book in the Katja series. Simon is the author of the industrial fiction novel Little Things To Fill Up The Void and three collections of short stories. He is also the author of Get Katja.

A few months ago I read Get Katja, the second book in the series, and loved it. This week I was happy to find Katja from the Punk Band was available to me. I dropped everything else and jumped on this book. I was not disappointed. Katja, along with most people, want off the island and on to the mainland. The island is dreary, dark, and depressing. There are chemical drug gangs and drug lords and life resembles life on the worst side of town. The mainland is may not be perfect, but it is a step up.

Here, as in Get Katja, the story is told from the point at all main characters and the reader will be jumping back and forth in time. When characters encounter each other it leads up to a climax, and then the story back tracks and is told from the other characters view point. It might sound a bit dizzy, going back and forth, but here it is done in such a way that is completely logical and fits well together. Everything revolves around Katja, and she is the nucleus of the book. The other characters move in and out like electrons around the nucleus of an atom sometimes moving closer and other times moving away.

The book's description calls Katja Jackie Brown meets the Sex Pistols, and I am at a loss to come up with a better description. Several plots, several main characters all working together in a punk rock environment makes this book hard to put down. This is not my usual reading material, but as a diversion I find it highly enjoyable. I am a Katja fan. ( )
  evil_cyclist | Mar 16, 2020 |
Katja is a young woman with a partially-shaved head and a tracheostomy tube coming out of her throat. Playing in a local punk band on an 8 by 12-mile island work camp called home, like everyone else, she wants to get to the mainland by any way possible.

Katja shoots her boyfriend and takes a very valuable vial from him (perhaps it's a new chemical drug). There will be someone on the mainland waiting for the vial, but the deal is for two people, so Katja enlists the help of Nikolai, a local junkie. The ship is leaving for the mainland in a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, Aleksakhina, Katja's corrupt parole officer, chooses tonight to do his job and detains her for not checking in on schedule. He is not the only one who wants the vial as the ticket to the mainland. There's Vladimir Kohl, a local chemical dealer; there is his boss, Szerynski, along with Dracyev, a rival chemical kingpin, and Ylena, his lover.

Katja and Nikolai regain possession of the vial. Their next problem is getting on the ship. The area is full of police who are authorized to kill anyone who attempts to stow away on the ship. If a stowaway is found on the ship while it is in transit, getting shot and thrown off the ship in the middle of the ocean is the least of their problems. Do Katja and Nikolai board the ship? Do they get off the ship on the mainland, also without the police finding them?

This is a really good industrial crime/suspense tale. The reader can almost hear the punk rock soundtrack all throughout this book. It is raw, fearless and very much worth reading. ( )
  plappen | May 29, 2017 |
I'd seen this book floating around Goodreads for a while, and my curiosity was whetted. Punk rock dystopic crime thriller? Sounds cool! So, when the opportunity came up to read it... I took it.

What's good here is the plot. It's an action-packed, violent book with nicely interlocking events involving several different low-lives and druglords all chasing after a mysterious vial, with the ultimate goal of escaping the island. It's quick-moving, good fun.

However - I have to admit that this felt like the work of a new author. I felt like it was... missing some bits. The characterization was sketchy-to-nonexistent. No one had any internal dialogue going on. This made a lot of the action opaque. Although there are a lot of colorful characters, they felt a bit cartoonish.

Mileage may vary, but I also found the author's technique of presenting an event, and then doubling back to show a different character's perspective of what led up to that event, to be distracting.

It's also missing the background. Where are these people? All the names are Eastern European, but they feel culturally British or American. What is this island that they're on, and why aren't they supposed to leave? I've read intentionally vague dystopic settings where the lack of specificity worked. Here, I just felt like it made the characters' motivations unnecessarily mysterious.

Also, people didn't really behave according to their specified characteristics. Nikolai is supposed to be a junkie - but we don't see him (let alone feel him) really jonesing for drugs. He kind of just seems like a generic loser. Katja is supposed to be a musician - but aside from a few quick references to past bandmates, and the fact that she drags around a guitar (which she uses for various purposes, but never plays), she never really thinks about music. Katja also has a (permanent, its implied) tracheotomy tube - but there's no mention of her having any difficulty with speech, difficulty being understood, or physical discomfort. The various villains and other people - no idea how they came to be who they are, or why.

I know there's a sequel to this - maybe more is explained later?

One last nitpicky thing (not a criticism of the book) - the girl pictured on the cover does not have Liberty spikes. Get your punk haircuts right, art team! ;-)






Thanks to NetGalley for the copy of the book!
( )
  AltheaAnn | Feb 9, 2016 |
I was intrigued by Simon Logan's KATJA FROM THE PUNK BAND, reading about it on his "coldandalone" author website about a year before it was published. I was re-reminded of the book via Spinetingler, who short-listed it on their list of 2010 Best Opening Lines.

I finally picked up a Kindle copy, couldn't put it down, read it furiously like I was sweating out a fever dream, and subsequently picked up Mr. Logan's entire bibliography. KATJA is a strong intro to his unique vision and worldbuilding, and is above all a fantastic novel - a fast, tight read that straddles sci-fi dystopia and hard-boiled crime noir.

The story takes place over the course of roughly 24 hours on an unnamed Russian "island" - a landscape that resembles a ROBOCOP New Detroit shantytown, without hope or cybernetic heroes. We are introduced to Katja, the titular punk rocker, armed with a mean survivalist streak, a guitar that doubles as a battleaxe, and a drug vial that is her ticket off the island - if she can live that long.

Chapter to chapter the point-of-view changes between several characters that have connections to either Katja or the vial, knowingly or unknowingly. Mr. Logan jumps-starts their backstories and staggers their POV's so that they overlap, giving us multiple perspectives on the same events and set-pieces while creating suspense and surprise.

The book is like looking at an industrial Escher print, and Mr. Logan writes with expert skill. The characters hurtle through the narrative, which is strewn with double-crosses, near-misses, and violent, extreme collisions.

Though it has elements of a "day after tomorrow" sci-fi and hard-boiled crime fiction, in KATJA Mr. Logan has created his own unique genre - apunkalyptic noir, maybe. His prose is cinematic, and white- or bloody-knuckled in equal measure. KATJA FROM THE PUNK BAND plays out like a Coen Brothers' movie set in Mad Max's universe. I look forward to reading more from Simon Logan in the future. ( )
  tiffanyleigh33 | Dec 23, 2014 |
Nonstop action from the first page until the last as several desperate people try to get off some sort of Russian slave labor island and back to the mainland. Logan creates a memorable world of chemical labs, video arcades, dark streets, and continual violence as everyone tries to gain control of a vial to hand over to a man on a cargo ship at midnight--in return for safe passage to the mainland. The story is told out of sequence, and very effectively so, as the various characters converge on the ship for the climax. It's a good one, and lives up to the high quality of the rest of the narrative. I have never read this author before. I see his work described as "industrial fiction", and it is as good a description as any. I can tell you that, as bleak as the world he depicts is, the characters in it still have hopes and dreams, however desperate. Those dreams provide an unstoppable momentum to KATJA FROM THE PUNK BAND, and I won't hesitate to read more by Logan. There is way too much going on in this book for me to have any hope at providing a good description--just buy it. Just read it. ( )
  datrappert | Mar 2, 2014 |
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Katja, like everyone else stuck on the work island they call home, wants to get to the mainland by any means necessary. Shooting her boyfriend and stealing a chemical vial is one way to ensure her safe passage; the only problem is, she's not the only one who wants it, and the freedom it will bring. There's Nikolai the joystick junkie; Aleksakhina, Katja's parole officer; Vladimir Kohl, the small-time chemical dealer, and his boss Szerynski; the rival chemical lord Dracyev, and his lover, Ylena. And there's the Man In Red, ready and waiting for whoever is (un)lucky enough to end up with the vial. Katja from the Punk Band is Jackie Brown meets the Sex Pistols, a fast-paced industrial crime-thriller that weaves multiple storylines and timeframes, from the author of Pretty Little Things to Fill Up The Void, Nothing Is Inflammable, and I-O.

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