Bloom, Myra (2015) A product of its time: A review of Heather O’Neill’s The Girl Who Was Saturday Night. The Puritan Magazine.

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

There are many ways in which Heather O’Neill’s The Girl Who Was Saturday Night asks us to suspend our disbelief. Seen through the eyes of 19-year-old Nouschka Tremblay, the seedy intersection of Montreal’s Rue Saint-Catherine and Boulevard Saint Laurent is the epicentre of a bohemian kingdom she presides over with her twin brother, Nicholas. Cats flit like fairies in an out of every scene, dusting the streets with magic. It is not, however, the book’s fantastic elements that pose the biggest challenge to us as readers: arguably, the greatest leap of faith we are asked to take occurs across linguistic lines. Although The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is written in English, its characters are francophones who have actively resisted learning “the language of colonialism.” 1 The novel is furthermore set in a francophone milieu on the eve of the 1995 referendum, a moment where …

Item Type:	Other
Date Deposited:	21 Mar 2017 18:27
Last Modified:	02 Aug 2021 08:43
URI:	https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/1516

Actions (login required)

Edit View