Customer Reviews

Kiss the Sky

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kiss the Sky - DC Gallin

On one of my last trips to London I found myself in Camden with my friend Jim, we were approached by this lady who was selling her book which was called "Woman in the Sky". We spoke to the lady for a while and Jim bought me the book. It sat in my bookcase for over a half a year before I picked it up and when I started reading it I kept telling myself off for not picking it up before.
Jim... thank you for buying me that book!

In this book we follow Claudia an artist who moves into a studio on Cable Street, East London. But much to her parents dismay she decided to follow her own dreams instead of following the ones her parents had for her.
Claudia hasn't been there long when she meets Paloma a french girl who is house-sitting nearby, but they become good friends but their friendship changes Claudias life forever.
Claudias choices may not always be the right ones but she makes the best out of every situation she gets into. Her choice in men I do find questionable but we don't control who we fall in love with.
The end made my heart flutter as I'd had my suspicions and when I was right I literally yelled out "YES"!

I am currently waiting for the next book from DC Gallin, "Kiss the Sky" was so personal it made me wonder if the author had lived what she'd just written about.

I do admit that when I saw the title "Kiss the Sky" I really was hoping it was a second book from DC, but I'll wait patiently for the next installment. The characters are very easy to relate to and it made me wish I was of that generation and could have lived in those times and experienced those things.

Thank you DC for a book that I'll always remember and especially for writing something that gave me goosebumps and a feeling that I was really reading something TRULY special and not something that's been used time and time again.

4.5 out of 5.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." The characters in "Kiss the Sky" by D C Gallin certainly prove this nugget of wisdom to be true. However, George Bernard Shaw also wrote, "Youth is wasted on the young." and the characters in Gallin's book show that Shaw may have had it right once, but not twice.

Gallin's stunningly realistic cast of artists, hedonists and other, purposeful and not-so-purposeful misfits are the oddest of heroes in the oddest of wars: the peaceful effort to maintain individuality, creative integrity and personal freedom in London. Claudia and her partners in crime and fun, Q and Paloma, crash in industrial squats, paint, create, photograph and dance their way through life fueled by passion for art, love and dreaming of a world where they can do as they wish, for as long as they wish, provided they do no one harm.

The freedom of their life, lived on the outer fringes of society, is palpable in Gallin's pages. You can feel the thump of the bass and drums in your chest and feel the trickles of perspiration across your body as you dance until dawn. Reading Gallin's excellent book is like attending a novel-long rave where the sex is hot, the music is loud and the people you meet are trippy, interesting beings following not the trusted, paved path.

But, eventually, the rave ends, the sun comes up and life's challenges creep in. Claudia and her friends find that the light of day sometimes brings an unforeseen perspective and, as is always true, some bad characters bent on using people try to work their way in to the circles of trust and freedom. Eventually, Claudia finds herself in what the poet Corso called "the most common of situations...trembling and knowledged with responsibility".

"Kiss the Sky" is an immersion into the underground world of rave culture. It is a work of art where paradox is embraced, as it is in real life, covering light, dark, bright, dull, good and bad as not mutually exclusive, but the multiple facets of the complexity of life. "Kiss the Sky" is also a study of people, art, freedom and responsibility.

Gallin's book manages to be all those things and yet be a fun and very humorous novel. Do yourself a favor, swallow the magic pellet of D C Gallin's, "Kiss the Sky" and allow her to take you on a beautiful and beatific trip without having to leave your favorite armchair.

This book is excellent at capturing the characters and place and events perfectly. If you like books about people then this really comes alive with an array of colourful characters. The story is based on a 20-something artist moving to London trying to make something of herself and her art. It is about the real person, the real art and for this reason it is a beautiful book.

All of these amazon reviews are a list of understatements, including this one I'm uploading here! :)
Downloaded this while it was free on Kindle, finished it that same night. This was a truly fantastic read and brilliantly written! It succeeded in giving me the motivation to finish my uni presentation for contemporary British writing and managed to wangle itself a mention in said presentation.
Have ordered a paper copy of this one now, and it's already got a list of people I've recommended it to journey around, whereby I guarantee they then do the same and buy their own copy so I can be greedy with my one >.< I particularly can not wait for the next book, keep up the good work! :D

Deliciously erotic...
Exuberantly creative....
Page turningly gripping...
Grittily realistic...

Kiss The Sky is a heart warming tale of life, love and lust in a 90's London caught between the explosive freedom of the growing counterculture, and society's increasingly tight control.
A rollicking good read!

To be continued...?

This book was really exciting and makes me want more action in my life! It's a transformation of young women as they grow from bohemian artists into adults. Anyone trying to make it as an artist will read with personal attachment as these girls somehow survive and keep their art intact. All the important topics are covered: love, art, drugs, sex. The characters are fantastic, their stories are heartfelt and engaging. The book will suck you in and keep you there until it's done. It was great finding this book. Seeing how young people live in london in a fantastically written book is a real prize. The language is real. The problems are serious. And it's funny! It's a refreshing read in an era where spy novels and zombie apocalypses seem to be the topic of every book. I've passed this on to several people. A book I'll definitely re-read.

*** Spoiler Alert ***

This is a truly magical read. This book will leave you feeling completely uplifted and refreshed.

This is the first book I have read by this author and I was very impressed.

The book is set in the present tense and is written in the view of Claudia. Claudia comes from a stable background but against her parents wishes decides to ditch the study and pursue her career as an artist. Claudia is definitely talented and could easily make it is a famous artist, however, the path she chooses makes it difficult for her to become a successful artist.

Claudia is soon involved in a world of drugs, psychedelic raves, exploring her sexuality, living in bedsits and squats and turbulent relationships.

This book is a way of experiencing that kind of life without living it for real, I do wonder if the author has had first hand experience of this kind of life as it really did open my eyes.

The description of the highs from drug taking was fantastically written and gave me a real insight without having to take the drugs!
When I was reading the chapters involving raves I could almost feel the high and hear the music blasting away in the background.

There are plenty of well developed characters and I especially liked Claudia's relationships with her good friends Q and Paloma. In the book everything the characters are doing is completely illegal, however, you don't actually think they are doing anything wrong.

The book has plenty of ups and downs but throughout the book I was completely engaged. The author did a good job of capturing the reader's interest.

This is the first book I have read by DC Gallin and would definitely read more of the author's work, whether it be a completely new story or a follow on to Kiss The Sky (I would love to know how Claudia's life progresses).

5 stars from me.

Becky Sherriff (The Kindle Book Review).

I arrived a little bit late at this party - and it wasn't until towards the end of the 90's and I'd notched up 50 years in this lifetime that I found myself in the wonderland of the rave culture. The sounds and visions, the sensory immersion and the emotional impact of what those parties had become by the time I got there are brought to vibrant life in this lovely book. There is an authenticity to the descriptions of these extraordinary scenes that will be immediately recognised by those who were there, and for those who weren't it will conjure up the excitement that we felt. This is a terrific artistic achievement.

But this book is far more than just a description of wild times in the rave scene. Start reading and beware! You may not be able to engage with your life again until you have finished it several hours later. In a way it's a classic love story of boys and girls finding and losing both love and lust. Its also the story of a feisty and creative young woman, Claudia, struggling to find her independence and her way to express her creativity. DC Gallin tells Claudia's story using the present tense and this helps the reader, or this one anyway, to be present in the story. But the appeal and the grip that this book exerts comes back to authenticity. Whether you were there or not you sense that you are hearing truth from the heart. And the truth is that as well as the beauty and the joy and the love there is the tawdry grime of the day after the party, the pain and the sorrow of the damaged souls that Claudia encounters. The honesty of her voice gives the reader the possibility of a variety of insights, and whilst those will depend upon the place of that reader, there is an area of interest that is universal - sex.

Claudia's descriptions of her feelings - emotional, physical and spiritual - as she tells of her sexual liaisons are highly erotic, but also, for a man, are very instructive and revealing about the female libido. This is a subject that remains deeply mysterious to many of my gender. We may have had a sexual revolution in the second part of the 20th century but we are emerging from an era of deep repression about sex and love and this has meant that few of us men have understood a woman's sexual desire and drives. Often we don't even have a very good understanding of our own sexual nature - this is also true for some women I have known - and it's part of many of our life journeys to explore and extend this understanding. So the honesty of Claudia's descriptions can add to our knowledge and put some new areas on the map for those of us traveling this path. Or just make us horny. Read and decide for yourself - and look forward to a great ending. Do not be tempted to take a short cut - you have to have made the trip to appreciate the destination.

Kiss The Sky
I read this book when I was on holiday in Morocco and I seriously could not put it down. So juicy, so full of life... so much insight. I felt totally inspired by the end... and I loved it so much that I'm making a short film about it this summer:)) Thank you to DC Gallin for the inspiration, and such an enjoyable novel!!! One day who knows, we might even make a feature film based on it!!WOOOP!:D

p.s.

If you read KISS THE SKY you will feel turned on by LIFE...No matter what mood you're in before you start. You're in for a great treat! Happy reading :)

Simone x

When I obtained a copy of 'Kiss the Sky', a self-published novel set amongst the `counter-culture' of the early 1990s, I wasn't quite sure what to expect... hardly surprising, given that few books outside the non-fiction genre bother to deal with this influential era in recent British social history.

It strikes me that the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, etc., have all received their fair share of coverage in literature. There's no rational explanation for the relative neglect of the early 90s in fiction: an era that saw "raves" come up from the underground and Ecstasy gain in popularity as the loved-up, tuned-in dance drug of choice. As well as giving us classic hardcore `tunes' and popular crossover bands such as The Shamen (who could ever forget the controversial `Es are good, Es are good - it's Ebenezer Goode'?), this era also spawned the Freedom to Party movement and the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (aka the Barry Legg Bill), which made it illegal for more than 12 people to listen to "repetitive beats" in the same location, and which still affects the (relatively tame) nature of the UK party scene today.

Author DC Gallin who, by all accounts, was a first-hand witness, gives us a fascinating and pacey insight into the roots of the `counterculture' that eventually grew to take over the mainstream. Amongst other things, she highlights the London squat scene of the early 90s, the free party scene, the behaviour of riot police when busting free parties, street art collectives, disapproving parents, the condition of social housing, abusive relationships, women's refuges and the prevailing strength of sisterhood.

From beautiful, e-fuelled strangers getting it on in the pitch dark chill-out room of an underground party venue to the pitches of Portobello Market and the Greenfields of Glastonbury Festival, the author takes us through a cultural journey... or should I say trip. And, it is a trip. 'Kiss the Sky' is a joint-induced, acid-driven look at life - sometimes without the rose-tinted spectacles or the protective dark shades - and it's sure to resonate with anyone who didn't just know `Dennis the Menace' as a cartoon character. In fact, it will take readers back to the strobe lights; the throwing of funky shapes; back to the time when repetitive beats truly lifted spirits and meant more than just a random night out.

The book also displays a sense of ironic humour. The incident with Max of "Viral Tribe" and a tin bath springs to mind - but I don't want to include a 'spoiler'.

For those who weren't personally acquainted with the free party scene and its various offshoots, `Kiss the Sky' works on so many other levels: part romance, part life-affirming novel about the importance of remaining independent and following our own destiny in the face of difficult challenges. My burning question that pervaded throughout the book was "how much of the material is autobiographical". Despite it being a work of fiction, DC Gallin lived on the London squat scene and is clearly drawing upon the experiences of the time. Exactly how much is fact and how much fiction will probably remain a mystery and perhaps it is more compelling that way!