AVALON

It’s 20 years since Avalon presented a musical in the West End. Jerry Springer: The Opera became associated with high ticket prices. Operation Mincemeat is about the 1943 wartime deception that wrong-footed Axis forces over the invasion of Sicily.

Acaciawood 57, Avalon 39Alliance Marine 56, Alliance Health Services 39Animo De La Hoya 54, Los Angeles Leadership 42Animo Robinson 50, Alliance Neuwirth 42Antelope Valley 78, Lancaster 63Bassett 68, Ganesha 12Camarillo 70, Moorpark 46CAMS 55, Geffen 54Compton Early College 57, Environmental Charter 40Contreras 54, Bernstein 44Corona Centennial 89, Corona 38CSDR 84, Baker 51Cypress 50, Tustin 35Edison 51, Fountain Valley 49El Dorado 64, Brea Olinda 38Esperanza 60, El Modena 59.

Nell Zink is a weird novelist. Not “zany” or “quirky” or any of those other words used to indicate affected oddness: weird. In any other novel, if the heroine was living as an indentured topiarist under the control of a southern California biker family, you would expect a climactic confrontation between our heroine and said bikers. With Zink, the only sure thing is that your expectations are going to be foiled.Avalon is a coming-of-age novel, following Bran from about the age of ten to her late teens. The plants she works with “lived and died in long rows, blissfully insensate cannon fodder in the never-ending war between supply and demand”. Bran becomes sensate cannon fodder in that same war.Her employers — called the