Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraqueąn and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. As Easter break approaches, Eugenia agrees to go on a spontaneous road trip with her rebellious classmate Luis Ťvez. Together they embark on a four-day, 400-mile journey from Caracas to Mřida in a banged-up Fiat, in search of Eugenia's grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. This is the setting in which a tentative but troubled romance begins. The story unfolds against Venezuela's "lost decade" of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that paved the way for the reign of Hugo Ch̀vez. With an unvarnished fluidity that brings to mind Jack Kerouac and a crazy-ass playlist that ranges from REM to Bob Dylan to El Canto del Loco to Shakira, Blue Label is an audacious, dark coming-of-age novel with a gut-punch of an emotional ending. It's the prize-winning first book by a writer who has cemented his reputation as a major young Latin American voice

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