Trish spends her time hustling and cheating to score. Heroin, Dilaudids, whatever she can get.

Precisely plotting the slippery slope of a heroin addict's existence, The Hummingbird Kiss paints a bleak picture but still manages to offer a ray of hope. The '70s are young, and 18-year-old Trish is a newlywed. When a Florida judge sentences her junkie husband to ten years for stealing stereos, she immediately seeks out a fix, and before she knows it she's hooked. There follows a long sojourn as she and her friends work small scams to score, head to California in search of better highs, move back to Florida, shoot up and nod off every chance they get — until death gets some of them.

MacEnulty has constructed a gritty and sorrowful book about a young girl with an appetite for the damage done. Trish comes from a broken but still functional family. She's witty, articulate and street-smart enough to know better than to get caught up in this life of self destruction, but childhood abandonment and the ensuing self-loathing are too much for her to manage without medication. Her life unravels as her cross-country wanderings take her from drug dens to rehabs to prison, with a few bleary-eyed months spent scoring drugs in the Tijuana barrios.

The author spares us no detail of her sordid descent, but Trish remains an engaging voice whose innate grain of goodness and interest in humanity keeps the reader on her side. Trish declines to blame anyone for her calamitous state. All she wants is the "hummingbird kiss of the needle" — the most wonderful experience she knows — until she inevitably winds up in prison and rediscovers the girl she once was.

"Searingly honest, often funny, always sordid story of a junkie’s life in the 1970s."—Chauncey Mabe, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

Trish MacEnulty