Heather O’Neill wrote a wonderful story with colour, emotion and chaos. This Giller Prize finalist for 2014, The Girl Who Was Satuday Night, also gave me an insight into so many that are raised in challenging economic situations and family dysfunction.
Twins, Nicolas and Nouschka. Étienne Tremblay, their father, a once popular Québécois minstrel. Their mother, not in their lives. LouLou, their grandfather. All within the bounds of Boulevard Saint-Laurent. What could go wrong? What went wrong was everything and nothing. Nicolas and Nouschka were their father’s pretty and talented children, but only on stage. Their grandfather did the best he could for them, providing them with food and a home. And of course the French/English divide from the 1970’s when the twins were young children to the 1990’s when they were in their late teens, added it's own form of chaos.
Nouschka narrated this story of twins that were in the midst of their father’s celebrity and yet at loose and parentless ends. They both felt the loss of their mother, one other person that fell to the charm of Étienne Tremblay. Both Nicolas and Nouschka's perceptions of this loss play out very differently. This is the story.
For anyone that is morally sensitive this may not be a book you want to read. Where there is no one to raise a child, the culturally appropriate boundaries of sex and friendship are missing. Learned by experience only.
The format of the book has been fairly controversial. First of all the cats that roam throughout the book, feral and lost but always landing on their feet, or just being there. Then 67 chapters, each one titled in words suggesting the chapter focus. The chapters were short. All of this can be off putting initially but my reading is that it matched the chaotic lives of all the characters in this book.
“I was trying my best to straighten out my life, but I always ended up
in the middle of some festive waste of time.”
~ Heather O’Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
Title: The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
Author: Heather O’Neill
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Publication Date: 2014
Format: Soft Cover
ISBN: 978-144344-245-9 (pbk.)
Type: Fiction ‘The author wishes to acknowledge the generous funding from the Canada Council for the Arts’
Heather O’Neill wrote a wonderful story with colour, emotion and chaos. This Giller Prize finalist for 2014, The Girl Who Was Satuday Night, also gave me an insight into so many that are raised in challenging economic situations and family dysfunction.
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