RED STAR TATTOO

The Glass Castle meets the Patty Hearst story in this riveting memoir about coming of age in a communist cult.

A heartwrenching, propulsive story, BEFORE THE REVOLUTION is Sonja Larsen's account of her teenage years in a communist organization agitating for an American revolution. Over three years embedded within the radical National Labor Federation's headquarters in Brooklyn, Sonja Larsen became the youngest member of the organization's militia and one of its inner circle. She soon became a mistress of the Old Man, the organization's charismatic leader. As she and the other members counted down the days until their American revolution was set to begin, Sonja's doubts about the revolution and the Old Man became increasingly difficult to ignore. In powerful, unsentimental prose, BEFORE THE REVOLUTION shows the seductions and dangers of extremism and asks how we can forgive our parents' faults before it's too late. It's an extraordinary work by an uncommonly talented debut author. As a child, SONJA LARSEN went to nearly a dozen different schools and lived in several communes and one cult. As an adult, she has worked as a telephone solicitor, a bartender, a freelance writer, and a teacher. She is currently a youth worker in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Sonja Larsen is a graduate of Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio, where one of her instructors was Steven Galloway. He wrote of an early draft: “The narrator is entirely compelling and trustworthy, and the story is riveting.” Larsen's writing has been published in a number of magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, including Room, Descant, Scissors and Spackle, THIS Magazine and The Globe and Mail, and in the anthology Flash 101: Surviving the Fiction Apocalypse.