I love this author, but this book was bad. I bailed after a couple chapters. It was billed as a sardonic dark family comedy but came across as an unbelievable episode of Jerry Springer. Yuck.

"It was three in the morning and I was walking along the Seine, just beside Notre Dame cathedral with Donny MacDonald, and he was singing songs from Carousel to me — I felt as though my heart would burst! And then there was this chill wind — so cool that I developed goose bumps even though the evening was hot and sultry. I had this premonition that my youth and carefree times were about to end — and it filled me with sadness and resignation — I mean, I'd only just begun to feel like a newly minted human being, entertaining all sorts of life options — or as many as a 1950s girl could entertain. So that was my little moment of happiness. Before I could digest anything I was back in school, and then marrying your father and having you kids, and it's as if the entire universe of possibilities that might have been mine ended right there on the Seine with Donny MacDonald." This took me longer than it normally would to read a Coupland book because it was a weird, hard month. Not my favourite of his but it's solidly good. Some moments like this one really got me.

Hilarious black humour. Dark, dark humour but the satire is buzzing and sparking with ideas. As nearly always, in a Coupland book the ideas are more important than plot or even character, but after just slogging through Don Quixote, this was exactly what I needed.