For this week’s installment, part two in the series “Sam gets better acquainted with Montreal’s cultural products”, we have a book: The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O’Neill.

Recently, this author has been coming up in basically every discussion of contemporary Anglo-Montreal literature. I even name-dropped her in my thesis, even though I hadn’t gotten around to actually reading her yet. Her third book came out this year, and the one I read came out last year. Both were nominated for the Giller prize, and her first book, Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads in 2007. She does great things with language, and her use of French is very much typical of the current literature coming out of English-speaking Montreal. I should have read her works ages ago. I am ashamed of how woefully out of date I am.

So, even though I picked up a couple new comics over the week and was secretly planning a Jessica Jones binge, I assumed I would be happy to spend time with this novel.

But. It didn’t work out that way. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…