The girl who was saurday night

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'Like Angela Carter, she is relentlessly inventive' Sunday Times
'Entrancing and antic and sensual as a dream' Guardian

The second novel by the author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel
Longlisted for the Baileys Prize 2015

At birth, Nouschka forms a bond with her twin that can never be broken.

At six, she's the child star daughter of Quebec's most famous musician.

At sixteen, she's a high-school dropout kicking up with her beloved brother.

At nineteen, she's the Beauty Queen of Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

At twenty, she's back in night school. And falling for an ex-convict.

And it's all being filmed by a documentary crew.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

CHAPTER 1 Girls! Girls! Girls! I was heading along Rue Sainte-Catherine to sign up for night school. There was a cat outside a strip joint going in a circle. I guessed it had learned that behaviour from a stripper. I picked it up in my arms. "What's new, pussycat," I said. All the buildings on that block were strip clubs. What on earth was their heating bill like in the winter? They were beautiful, skinny stone buildings with gargoyles above the windows. They were the same colour as the rain. There were lights blinking around the doors. You followed the lightbulbs up the stairs. They were long-life lightbulbs, not the name-brand kind. The music got louder and louder as you approached the entrance of the club, like the music in horror films. Cars filled with American boys would come up to see the girls, girls, girls on the day the boys turned eighteen. The boys from Ontario came in on the train and slept nine to a hotel room downtown. Because you could do anything you wanted with the Québécois girls. You could stroke their asses. You could lick their privates with everyone watching. You could take them behind a little curtain and fuck them while wearing bright blue condoms that the girls could keep their eyes on. The girls were backstage, getting ready. Their big toes were getting stuck in their fishnets. Their yellow ponytails were being put up lopsided. They were putting on too much makeup. Their bangs were in their eyes. Their tummies folded over the elastic bands of their underwear. One was wearing big glasses because she'd lost her contact lenses. One drank a glass of water that made her feel cold inside, and she wondered if she was going to have a bladder infection. And one of the girls yawned, and everything is so catching in these clubs that everyone started yawning and yawning. The ones who had been dancing awhile looked like Barbie dolls with their muscles and knee-high boots and their no-nonsense attitude. They were like superheroes. The new girls showed up onstage with inappropriate underwear and bikini bottoms and high-heeled shoes a size too big. One eighteen-year-old girl was wearing a sailor hat from her grandfather's closet in Saint-Jérôme. She'd been raised for this life, whether anyone wanted to admit it or not. We were all descended from orphans in Québec. Before I'd dropped out of high school, I remembered reading about how ships full of girls were sent from Paris to New France to marry the inhabitants. They stepped off the boat with puke on their dresses and stood on the docks, waiting to be chosen. They were pregnant before they even had a chance to unpack their bags. They didn't want this. They didn't want to populate this horrible land that was snow and rocks and skinny wolves. They spoke to their children through gritted teeth. That's where the Québec accent came from. The nation crawled out from between their legs. Copyright © 2014 by Heather O'Neill Excerpted from The Girl Who Was Saturday Night: A Novel by Heather O'Neill All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This quirky novel is O'Neill's second after the critically acclaimed Lullabies of Little Criminals, released in 2006 and also set in the author's native Montreal. Journalist O'Neill frequently contributes to This American Life, which may account for her love of whimsical and unusual characters. Here she tells the story of 19-year-old Nouschka Tremblay, daughter of a famous French Canadian chanteur. Nouschka and twin brother Nicholas have shared an intimate relationship since birth, with few rules or parental attention, and are recognized wherever they go, often appearing in the tabloids for their drunken escapades. They take many lovers before she unpredictably chooses a husband: a former child star figure skater on parole for hoarding dogs. While Nouschka works and goes to school sporadically, her main role is taking care of her family and carving out an identity for herself outside of them. Verdict With chapters mostly three pages or less, the narrative moves at a quick pace, much as early adulthood seems to move. Unfortunately, it also suffers from the same self-importance and melodrama of that age. Readers who seek out complex narrators, coming-of-age dilemmas, and dysfunctional family sagas will enjoy this novel. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]-Kate Gray, Worcester P.L., MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

O'Neill's follow up to international bestseller Lullabies for Little Criminals follows twins, Nouschka and Nicolas Tremblay, through their travails in ‘90s Quebec in an entertaining but hollow story. The story is told through Nouschka's relentlessly energetic voice and begins by outlining their childhood: their father is Quebecois folk legend Etienne Tremblay and mostly absent, and their mother left them as infants. As kids, Etienne used the twins for promotional stunts, making them minor local stars. Now, 19-years-old and dropped out of high school, Nicolas and Nouschka are adrift; partying and sleeping around. Nouschka enrolls in night school and falls in love as Nicolas attempts to forge a relationship with their mother without success. Nouschka laments that their mother "had loved us on television. The same way that everybody had loved us, which was the same thing as not loving us at all." Their father reappears with an eager documentarian who hopes to film the Tremblay family, and things begin to unravel. The ride through the twins' coming-of-age is largely enjoyable, though also forgettable. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The girl of the title is Nouschka Tremblay; she and her twin brother, Nicholas, are the 19-year-old children of Etienne Tremblay, a once-famous folksinger and composer who, though his career is now in eclipse, is still celebrated. The twins, high-school dropouts and adrift, are famous, too, their every move reported in the tabloids. Set in Montreal in the 1990s, the story, told by Nouschka, follows her attempts to straighten out her life even as her brother's becomes ever more erratic. Raised by their elderly grandfather, the twins live together on the edge of poverty, and Nicholas has resorted to petty thievery to support himself. Meanwhile, Nouschka has become a student in night school, hoping to receive her high-school diploma, go on to college, and become a writer. Her plans are interrupted when she falls in love with Raphael, who may be schizophrenic. Complications ensue. O'Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals, 2006) has written a marvelously intriguing novel of a family in dissolution, each member of which is richly and memorably characterized. A secondary theme involving the Quebec separatist movement evokes the possible separation of the intense bond that has characterized the twins' lives. The book is beautifully written, particularly rich in simile and metaphor ( The pink clouds in the sky were delicates soaking in the sink ; The notes from the piano were like raindrops falling on the lake ). Compulsively readable, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is a delight for any night.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A young Montreal woman tries to escape her minor fame to have a normal life but can't see past her bizarre family.Nouschka Tremblay's family ties are stronger than most; when she was young, her father, tienne, a folk singer, catapulted her and her twin brother, Nicolas, into the small but intense spotlight of Montreal media by using them as props on late-night TV shows to help promote his music and the cause of French-Canadian separatism. At the start of the book, though she is now 19, she and Nicolas still sleep in the same bed and are still embedded in Montreal's consciousness. When Nicolas dropped out of high school, she followedno matter how many bad choices she makes about men, no one else is worthy of her devotionbut now she is starting to regret it. When a documentarian starts filming her family to see what has come of the famous Tremblays, Nouschka starts to imagine a life beyond her family, first going back to school for her diploma and then getting married to a man her brother loathes. The story is delightfully bizarre, flush with the free-form vacuity of early adulthood, but what really shines here is O'Neill's writing. The author (Lullabies for Little Criminals, 2006) stuns with the vivid descriptions and metaphors that are studded throughout the book, such as "[h]e looked at me some days like I was a hostage that no one was paying the ransom for" and "[The swan] held its wings in front of it, like a naked girl with only her socks on, holding her hands over her privates." As Nouschka begins to see herself as a separate person, O'Neill's writing grows ever more distinct and direct. This vigorous writing makes the book; the story is surprising and satisfying, but the real star is Nouschka and how she tells it.A coming-of-age story with a working-class, reality TV twist. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.