Rose of No Man's Land

I just went on a one-hour, seemingly hopeless online search for a coming-of-age novel I read a couple of years ago. When I was reading Every Secret Thing, I made a note in the margin: "look up novel. teenage girls. friendship. drugs. putt putt. neon. elephant." That's all I remembered about it, but the girl friendship psychological stuff in Lippman's book and how it's so easy to tip into very bad territory reminded me of this primarily forgotten book that somehow stuck with me.

LibraryThing saved the day! Michelle Tea's Rose of No Man's Land came up when I searched a tag mashup of coming of age, drugs, fiction. Prior to that, I had spent a long time trying to find a site on which I could search plot synopses or browse by BISAC codes. I also came across Whichbook, which was fun, but not fruitful. I read on the fiction_l listserv that FictionDB is good for finding books that are escaping you, but I couldn't access a lot of the site since I don't subscribe.

I was on the edge of giving up, but I'm glad I didn't. Now I want to find more books like it.