The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

April 21, 2014
O'Neill's follow up to international bestseller Lullabies for Little Criminals follows twins, Nouschka and Nicolas Tremblay, through their travails in â90s 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 Ãtienne 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.

May 1, 2014
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, Etienne, 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 followed-no matter how many bad choices she makes about men, no one else is worthy of her devotion-but 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.

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Starred review from May 1, 2014
The girl of the title is Nouschka Tremblay; she and her twin brother, Nicholas, are the 19-year-old children of tienne 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2014

Notorious Etienne Tremblay, an outre performer who's in jail almost as much as he's onstage, has finally burned out, and his 19-year-old twins, Nicholas and Nouschka, must make their own way. Nouschka is beginning to realize that to survive she must break with not only her father's past but her nearly over-the-edge brother. Canadian author O'Neill's internationally best-selling Lullabies for Little Criminals won the Paragraphe Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, was short-listed for six prizes (e.g, . the Orange Prize), and was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, so pay attention.

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