A review by isaiah43books
Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. by Luis J. Rodríguez

dark sad tense slow-paced

1.0

Always Running is a memoir of a young man who ended up in LA gangs in the 1960s. While I appreciated the straightforward approach to talking about his trauma, the graphic sexual content was a big turn off. This book was pornographic to say the least and the stories of sexual encounters could have been told without the details. The story also jumped all around from Luis’s age of 9 to 18 without any dates or general timeline. The story also jumped between past and present tense which was confusing.
As for the story, it was an interesting story of overcoming the trauma in his life. I do feel that Luis had a very external locus of control seeing everything as someone else’s fault with no responsibility for himself. The final chapters did resolve that as he started to take control of his life but he never seemed to take responsibility for the wrong things that he did without anyone telling him to. Finally, he went into great detail about his drug use but didn’t portray it as a negative thing but rather as a wonderful seductive experience that he lived for.
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