Throwaway Angels

by Nancy Richler

Tova's lacklustre life - days spent running the Kwik Kleen Laundromat, nights spent brooding about being dumped by her girlfriend - picks up its pace when her friend Gina disappears. Gina works as a stripper in a local bar, and the cops don't show much interest when sex trade workers go missing. Reaching for a boldness she didn't think she possessed, Tova begins her own investigation. Throwaway Angels is a compelling whodunit, a fast-paced novel about friendship and living with courage.

Genres: Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Nancy Richler was a Canadian novelist. Born in Montreal, Quebec in 1957, she spent much of her adult life and career in Vancouver, British Columbia before returning to Montreal in the early 2010s.

Richler published her first novel, Throwaway Angels, in 1996. The novel was shortlisted for an Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Her 2003 novel Your Mouth Is Lovely won the 2003 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2004 Adei Wizo Award. Her 2012 novel The Impostor Bride was a shortlisted nominee for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Reviews

[Erika Nerdypants · Rating 2 out of 5]

SPOILER ALERT

I give this 2.5 stars. I liked some aspects of this book, but in the end it really failed to deliver. Which is very disappointing, because I really wanted this to be good. I think this was supposed to be a sort of mystery, only in the end the crime never gets solved. The protagonist initially reads like a gritty, no-nonsense working class heroine, but I finished the book feeling more like she was depressed and unable to really find focus in her humdrum life. As a lesbian, of course I wanted to identify with her, but just wasn't able to. The story revolves around disappearing sex trade workers in Vancouver, and as we all know, this is far from fiction. I think the author wrote this prior to the discovery of many murdered women's bodies on a pig farm in Vancouver, so maybe that was the reason for the crime in the book remaining unsolved. That the police and other authorities showed little concern at the increasing numbers of disappearing women from Vancouver's East side is sadly also true. To date, several hundred Aboriginal women in Canada remain missing, and no one seems to care all that much. A sad social commentary, but somehow it didn't work for me in this work of fiction.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book after reading her most recent novel, The Imposter Bride, which I absolutely loved. This novel though just sort-of ended at the end. No resolution whatsoever after 3/4 of the book is spent trying to find Gina. I was disappointed. We never find out where Gina is or what happened with any of it. I liked the main character who was a lesbian, but even she became tedious like the story at times. This was Nancy Richler's first novel, so I can forgive her a bit for that, but overall, not something that truly gripped me, even though the storyline about missing teenage girls who work at a strip club, which was slightly interesting overall.