Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0771037929, Hardcover)
From the celebrated, bestselling author of the Giller Prize finalist A Student of Weather, comes a darkly funny, sad-eyed novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real love and movie love – and real love doesn’t stand a chance
Elizabeth Hay’s virtuoso second novel is set in Ottawa in the 1990s and tells the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named Dinah for Dinah Shore.
Breaking in upon this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the jaded widow of a blacklisted screenwriter and her sardonic stepson. They bring harsh reality. In the shakeup that follows their arrival, new alliances form, casualties mount, and old obsessions linger as winter turns into the warmest spring on record and the movie club gradually and inevitably dissolves.
In this deliciously entertaining novel, which goes straight to the core of our innermost longings and desires, Elizabeth Hay confirms her status as one of Canada’s most original and accomplished voices.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English
The author seems to be clumsy with her writing, stumbling through small plot lines, and quite a few times I was left confused about why she had written a certain phrase, or why she had a certain character say something.
Also, for me at least, it's not until towards the end of the book that you feel you know the characters well enough. Several times towards the middle of the story, I couldn't figure out why the author had put characters into a plot line, when we didn't know the characters well enough to understand it.
Overall, I enjoyed the concept more then the book, so I give it 3 stars. (