The only thing worse than a goddamned hippie is someone who wants to be a goddamned hippie and fails. And the complete and utter failure begins before you even open the book- check out the album the ugly bitch on the cover is flaunting so we'll see and how "hip" and "with it" this novel is. It's fucking Chicago, the squarest music you can possibly imagine. Seriously, right now, name a band lamer and more corporate than Chicago. Can't do it, can you? Way to have you finger on the pulse of the revolution, Paul Neimark, you establishment hack.

So anyway, the story is about this whiny, filthy hippie who wants to meet a chick who "doesn't dig death". Obviously he's a complete fucking moron, but somehow he finds a girl who's equally dirty and stupid and they fall in the kind of love you only experience once in a lifetime, usually while reading a shitty book like this. Here's my favorite example of their stupidity:

No, that would make time seem like it was going twice as fast, you goddamned cretins. Oh, I almost forgot, one of the big things they have in common is that they both think "MacArthur Park" is the most brilliant thing ever written. That's right, the "someone left the cake out in the rain" song. The chick even fingers herself while she listens to it. These two poleheads and their shitbag love affair sucked so fucking much that I couldn't wait for the inevitable twist, and finally it came: the girl has cancer.

Hooray!

Unfortunately, she survives (spoiler warning). That's bad enough, but the very end where the main guy is running down the street yelling "She lives!" is such an obvious attempt to invent a catchphrase that it's fucking embarrassing. For real, how could anyone take this book seriously? People who hate disgusting, smelly hippies wouldn't touch it, and real hippies generally don't read anything besides Howl and Doonesbury but the few that did pick it up would be pissed because the only thing about their lifestyle it gets right is the part where we find out that the chick doesn't wear deodorant. In short, it's a book by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about, for people who don't what's going on, and about something that sucks (hippies not dying of cancer). It's a failure on every conceivable level.