The Girl Who Was Saturday Night: A Novel

By Heather O'Neill

Finalist for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize

From the author of the international bestselling, award-winning Lullabies for Little Criminals, a coming-of-age novel set on the seedy side of Montreal’s St. Laurent Boulevard

Gorgeous twins Noushcka and Nicolas Tremblay live with their grandfather Loulou in a tiny, sordid apartment on St. Laurent Boulevard. They are hopelessly promiscuous, wildly funny and infectiously charming. They are also the only children of the legendary Québécois folksinger Étienne Tremblay, who was as famous for his brilliant lyrics about working-class life as he was for his philandering bon vivant lifestyle and his fall from grace. Known by the public since they were children as Little Noushcka and Little Nicolas, the two inseparable siblings have never been allowed to be ordinary. On the eve of their twentieth birthday, the twins’ self-destructive shenanigans catch up with them when Noushcka agrees to be beauty queen in the local St. Jean Baptiste Day parade. The media spotlight returns, and the attention of a relentless journalist exposes the cracks in the family’s relationships. Though Noushcka tries to leave her family behind, for better or worse, Noushcka is a Tremblay, and when tragedy strikes, home is the only place she wants to be.

With all the wit and poignancy that made Baby such a beloved character in Lullabies for Little Criminals, O’Neill writes of an unusual family and what binds them together and tears them apart. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is classic, unforgettable Heather O’Neill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781443436489

Heather O'Neill

HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads, was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives there today.

Reviews for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not my thing. It's not you, book, it's me.

[bucketofrhymes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Heather O'Neill's writing is the perfect balance of disturbing, unsettling, beautiful, and magical.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Heather O'Neill wrote the charming and gritty Lullabies for Little Criminals and so I was excited to see that she'd written another book, this one called The Girl Who Was Saturday Night. Set in the same hardscrabble, working class Montreal, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is Nouschka Tremblay, who along with her twin brother Nicolas, are the children of a famous folk singer, now down on his luck. While they were paraded out as children in front of audiences, their father left their upbringing to their grandfather. Essentially alone in the world, the two children formed a close bond that continued into adulthood. Now twenty, Nouschka is beginning to see that charm, beauty and being the daughter of a local celebrity isn't enough and she begins to try to better herself, going back to school and looking for a better job. Meanwhile, the men in her life are still committed to the personas they took on when they were fourteen, unwilling to see that what was cool back then, might not look so admirable in adulthood.Nouschka has a fantastic voice. She manages to survive in a rough setting and under difficult circumstances with grace and a poetic optimism, that she maintains even in her darkest hours. She also enjoys the life she has, even if she can see that it needs improving. It's the quality of O'Neill's writing that made this book so much fun to read and her ability to create outrageously colorful characters who feel as real as anyone. I'll continue to read whatever I find by her.

[toobusyreading · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nouschka and twin brother Nicolas never had caring parents, were children made famous because of their fame-seeking and exploitative father, and were too close to each other. A recipe for disaster. “Nicolas and I were always trying to make every single person we met fall in love with us. What a job. It was a bad habit that we had picked up as child stars. But maybe it's the same for everybody.”This novel is a sad, sweet story of people getting through life the best the can, and making lots of bad decisions along the way. Normally, too many similes and metaphors in a book start feeling contrived and annoy me. However, it was different for this one. Nouschka thought in similes. Hundreds of them, or so it seemed. They were creative and imaginative and touching, and very appropriate and descriptive.There is some sex in this book, and some of it quite inappropriate, and it felt sad and desperate. There was some profanity, some of it pretty strong, but not lots of it, not so much for shock value but for the sad way the characters viewed their own lives.I fell in love with Nouschka, and her way of looking at the world, her optimism and pessimism living in harmony with one another.Towards the end of the book, there is“Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they are writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.” This book was written in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men. And I loved it.I was given an advance reader's copy of this book for review. The quotes may have changed in the published edition.

[janismack · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

You know Istarted reading this book and had a hard time relating to it because the caracters were so weird and off the wall. I didn't think I would finish it but curiosity was too much. I wanted to know what happened to all of these people. It's a sad story, many broken lives but the end is hopeful.

[romonko · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Such a surprising story! At the beginning it looked like it would be a coming-of-age story about a pair of misfit twins who appear to be running of the rails and running circles around their care-giver grandfather. Nicolas and Noushka Tremblay appear to be 19 year-old out-of-control teenagers when the book opens. And yes, they are that, but as we read we hear about their sad and tragic upbringing. Abandoned by their teenage mother, exploited and then ignored by their ego-maniac performer father, they truly don't feel like they belong anywhere and they know that they need to rely on each other to just survive in the cold, cruel world of Montreal during the mid-1990 national sovereignty referendum. Their grandfather tries his best to raise these two rebellious teens, but he is clearly out of his element, and gives up and lets them raise themselves. As you can guess this is a disaster. Both teens are sexually active, do drugs and alcohol and get into the worst messes, and because of their famous father, all of this is played out in the tabloids. As I read I felt so sorry for these two lost twins. I found that I was in Noushka's corner rooting for her to be able to leave all this mayhem behind her. We watch her as she makes a disastrous marriage choice and as she watches as she has to make the conscious decision to leave her beloved twin brother behind her before he takes her with him on the train wreck of life choices. It broke my heart watching her brave attempts to pull herself out. I have mixed feelings about the content of this book, but not about the family values and courage that the book portrays so well. With trepidation, I recommend this book. It will lead you to examine the importance of family values and will cause you to reevaluate what you think are the most important things to consider when parenting children. Another worthy entry in the prestigious short-listed Giller Prize list of books.

[smits_52 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

well written quirky book with paragraphs sometimes hard to decipher their meaning told with such an edgy voice.I grew up in Mtl but not like these twins did on the Blvd Saint- Laurent looking out for each other and growing up alone in separatist Quebec with an absent father who is a cultural icon and a grandfather too old to do anything with them. It's rather a sad story and fanciful too or is it ?

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Heather O'Neill has evoked life in working-class Montreal so well in this novel. As Nouschka Tremblay comes of age and tries to decide what path her life should take, Quebec is facing a similar question in the upcoming referendum on separation. Nouschka is extremely close to her twin brother (Nicholas) -- at nineteen, they continue to share a bed. She left school because he did; now, she's returning. Can she live her own life, independent from Nicolas? This is a great book....unforgettable characters who get into all kinds of minor and major trouble with family and other relationships. It's fast moving and will draw you into the spirit of the time and place.

[_zoe__1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked up this book because I loved the author’s previous work, Lullabies for Little Criminals. In Lullabies, she recounts the horrors of Montreal poverty through the innocent eyes of a young girl who has never known anything different.The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is similar in that it too deals with people who have grown up in Montreal without a lot of opportunity to live a normal life. Nouschka and her twin brother Nicolas were famous thanks to their singer-songwriter father, but they also had to deal with the fact that their parents had abandoned them as babies and left them to be raised by their grandfather. This abandonment is in many ways the defining event of their lives, and much of the book deals with their attempts to come to terms with it.The main difference between this book and Lullabies is that where Baby was an innocent child unable to control the events around her, Nouschka is nineteen and theoretically capable of making her own decisions. This somehow makes it even more painful when she’s constantly thrown off course by the reckless behaviour of the people around her. She dropped out of school when her brother did, even though she was a decent student, and there’s at least one incident in the book when he physically prevents her from attending the night school classes that she’s enrolled in to obtain her GED. On more than one occasion, I found it difficult to keep reading because nothing ever seemed to go right; there was just one disaster after another. In some ways, this is a valuable glimpse at life in a different world: so many of our choices are determined by our loved ones and by the expectations for people in our socio-economic group. Still, that didn’t always make for a pleasant or enjoyable read.Nouschka’s age in comparison to Baby also means that The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is in some ways a lot coarser than Lullabies for Little Criminals. There’s more casual sex and drinking and partying, often with explicit descriptions and language, and without that sense of innocence at the core. Of course, this adds a note of realism, but it’s not necessarily the sort of realism that I want to be immersed in. In some strange way, I found it easier to read about Baby’s experiences as a prostitute, because it was clear that she had gotten herself into a situation that was wrong and uncomfortable, all for the sake of a few gifts and a sense of acceptance. Nouschka’s activities are basically represented as normal and unremarkable, certainly by comparison to the people around her.Reading this book was a strange experience for me. I found much of the content unpleasant, and it wasn’t really a story that I wanted to become engrossed in. When I set the book down, I wasn’t necessarily eager to pick it up again. And yet when I did pick it up, I frequently found myself more absorbed in the story than I’d expected, staying up too late at night when I had planned to read for just half an hour. I still like O’Neill’s writing and find it very readable, though I could have done without the over-the-top cat references hinting at some deep symbolism that I was unable to appreciate. Nouschka is a memorable protagonist who really came alive for me. And the story isn’t all bleak; at the risk of spoilers, I’ll even say that it ends on a note of optimism, after first travelling through the depths of despair. I just wish we could have spent more time on the high notes, to make the overall journey a bit more enjoyable.

[rdra1962 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are two compelling reasons to read this book. First is the story - a rather disturbing, wild tale of the twin children of a fallen Quebecois singing star. The children have been abandoned by both parents and although they live with their grandfather, they are rather feral, disturbingly emotionally dependent and self-destructive. The story takes place in the St. Laurent neighborhood and the latest separation referendum is the backdrop and a catalyst. It was hard to watch these characters continually make horrible decisions, it was hard to turn away. O'Neill weaves the perspective of the "YES" side of the referendum voters into her story, interesting to me as an anglophone ex-Montrealer who was living in Toronto at the time! The connection and the charisma of the twins is both their salvation and their possible downfall, and the reader watches as they try to save each other and themselves.

The second reason to read this book is the writing. There are sentences in this book that are so stunningly beautiful and insightful and truthful that they are almost a distraction. Other reviewers have quoted quite a few, and so I won't repeat them, but this book should be used as a textbook for every creative writing course ever taught going forward. There are phrases that are so powerful they could be their own chapters; they crystalize situations, emotions, lives...they are brilliant.

[obtusata · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Quirky and full of O'Neill's wit and whimsy.

[spuriouscarrie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was good. Really good. I've liked O'Neill's stuff since I first heard her tell stories on the CBC radio show Wiretap well over 10 years ago. She is very good at this writing thing. And the cats! O I loved all the cats.Quotes:(page 2)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. (page 69)Adam had been questioned by the police a couple times, but they always let him go. They could tell from his manner that he was an upper-class kid. Rich people weren't responsible for petty crimes. They were responsible for the great crimes that took hundreds of years to commit and were, therefore, unpunishable. (page 143)You could see that he had a tattoo of Jesus on his chest. There wasn’t much scarier than a tattoo of Jesus. It meant that you were spiritually inclined. And if you were spiritually inclined around here, it probably wasn’t Sunday school that got you that way. Rather, it was a combination of hard drugs and deep injustice to yourself. It was the last resort.