Riya Anne Polcastro, JANE

From Another Read Through’s website:

Join us in welcoming Riya Anne Polcastro as she reads from her novel, Jane.

Somewhere out there is a line in the sand between sanity and insanity. Jane searches that line out, toys with it, revels in it, and then takes a running leap right over it.

Sex, drugs, and gangster rap come together in this deliciously transgressive novel to show you a side of crazy you never knew you wanted to see.

When twenty-five year old Jane moves back to her hometown in order to care for her schizophrenic aunt, miscarriage and an unfaithful fiancé fresh in her mind, the seeds are ripe for her mother’s cruel words to come true:

“You’re going to end up just like your aunt. You’re going to end up in a mental hospital someday.”

Caught between the secrets lurking below the surface of such childhood traumas and Aunt Rose’s demons―soon Jane is in desperate need of an escape. She find it in The Circle, a mismatched group of twenty-somethings who wave their amateur psychiatric diagnoses like badges of honor and party until the sun comes up. Little does she know, her new friends will be the source of her inevitable unravelling.

Armed with a useless liberal arts degree, Riya Anne Polcastro is a student of human behavior and a conduit for raw words. Maybe it is because she learned to read and write in her second language before she learned to do the same in her first. Maybe it is because she was raised a missionary’s daughter at the same time that she was taught to question everything. Maybe there are a whole lot of reasons. Either way, her fascination with mental illness and human interaction is weaved into fiction with a language that is at times caressed and loved, at others beaten into submission.