What do you think?
Rate this book
Be Good
Morgan and Hannah are part of a group of fellow twenty-something Canadians struggling to navigate a maze of love affairs, failed relationships, obsessions, and departures from the familiar—each with a distinct persona molded by secrets and deceptions. Set against the acutely-drawn urban landscapes of Montreal and Vancouver, this gritty novel deftly shifts perspective from the innocent and idealistic Hannah to the streetwise and damaged Morgan, as well as to their friends and the men in their lives. The book eloquently exposes the lies people tell themselves and others in order to cope with life, and reveals the ongoing alienation and isolation of a world where the only reliable narrator is the future.
183 pages, Paperback
First published October 10, 2007
2 people are currently reading
208 people want to read
About the author
Stacey May Fowles
15 books97 followersStacey May Fowles is is an award-winning novelist, journalist, and essayist. She has written for the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Torontoist, the National Post, Deadspin, Hazlitt, and Vice Sports, among others. Her most recent book, Baseball Life Advice, was published in spring 2017. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 6, 2010
I have a secret.
This book is about me.
I could have written this book (if I could write like Stacey May Fowles). Being twenty-five, I've just emerged from my early twenties and this book took me back in the most delicious of ways. I love books that invoke nostalgia, and this one did just that in a sexy, sordid sort of way. It dug up memories from that time and managed to frame even the ugly ones in a "beautifully broken" little package. I really enjoy writing that can make romance out of the most flawed things, and Be Good tops the list of books that effectively accomplish this.
I also loved the way Fowles used several points of view to explore the very many realities that exist solely because of subjectivity. How we can never really know another person because we are inevitably limited by our own experiences. For me, this highlights the rarity--therefore, the importance--of true connections with others, as demonstrated by how very hard it is to be truthful with even ourselves. I love how heavily Be Good touches on this, treating the theme with importance.
This is the first book in a long time that made me want to write again. Perhaps because it's good to "write what you know", and Be Good acted as an example of a book I could write because its subject speaks to me so much. Damn you, Stacey May Fowles, for writing it first! But seriously, good job. A lesser writer would have made it sound emo, kind of like Reality Bites.
This book is about me.
I could have written this book (if I could write like Stacey May Fowles). Being twenty-five, I've just emerged from my early twenties and this book took me back in the most delicious of ways. I love books that invoke nostalgia, and this one did just that in a sexy, sordid sort of way. It dug up memories from that time and managed to frame even the ugly ones in a "beautifully broken" little package. I really enjoy writing that can make romance out of the most flawed things, and Be Good tops the list of books that effectively accomplish this.
I also loved the way Fowles used several points of view to explore the very many realities that exist solely because of subjectivity. How we can never really know another person because we are inevitably limited by our own experiences. For me, this highlights the rarity--therefore, the importance--of true connections with others, as demonstrated by how very hard it is to be truthful with even ourselves. I love how heavily Be Good touches on this, treating the theme with importance.
This is the first book in a long time that made me want to write again. Perhaps because it's good to "write what you know", and Be Good acted as an example of a book I could write because its subject speaks to me so much. Damn you, Stacey May Fowles, for writing it first! But seriously, good job. A lesser writer would have made it sound emo, kind of like Reality Bites.
March 20, 2011
Despite this generosity, I know she toys with me daily, her laughter piercing and the inaccessibility of her body unforgiving. She will disappear for days and never tell me where she has gone, and I am forced to make love to her with such severity in the hope that my name will be burned inside her so the others will read the ownership like Braille. I find marks on her body, bruises and bites, and I play back the moments we have spent together and I know that another man has planted them there. I count them like inventory and when there are too many I will count them again to be sure, trace them with my fingertips and yet say nothing, constantly afraid that a single word will cause her to walk out the door a final time.
***
Be Good, the bracing 2007 debut from Stacey May Fowles, is a novel internally divided.
And I mean that as the highest praise possible.
Following a small group of twenty-somethings (and one forty-something) as they drink and smoke and fuck and cut and let down and traumatize one another from one end of Canada to the other, Be Good is a novel of experiences—some more pleasant than others, all of them painted with brutal, sometimes-inebriated honesty.
Centred around Hannah and Morgan and their is-there-or-isn’t-there-I-wish-I-knew-what-to-think relationship, Be Good is cut into small snapshot chapters, presented in a non-linear fashion that reads less like a novel and more like a near-abstracted stream of memories—with all sides given voice. What’s even more interesting is the presence of an authorial diction to the narration, as if the memories of these broken-and-pieced-back-together-again individuals are all being filtered through the same lens, coalescing as one unseen narrator’s shared, abusive, neglectful, love-craving set of experiences.
The outcome of this is a work of multiple perspectives that reads as one person’s inability to accept what has happened, refusing to settle on a single, dogmatic perspective of the events at hand. This draws conflicting—but necessary—conclusions to the intentions of the presented voice: to offer an even hand to the relationships presented, showing all sides of how something can fall apart through so much unspoken vitriol; or to further illustrate the confusion and doubt one person can feel about their role—and the role of all others—in the total destruction of a relationship or series of relationships.
Be Good is a sometimes painful, always rewarding read. Fowles repeatedly intoxicates readers with imagery that straddles the tightrope between beautiful and horrific:
It was all so liberating until I held the very human consequences of it inside me like a weight that made me immobile, a weight I decided to name Archangel Gabriel until I felt it cramp and bleed out of me after I drowned it in vodka and disregard.
Abuse through poetic licence. Gorgeous and not, all at once.
Which describes Be Good at its core: a beautiful, tightly written work that will cut you with every pass of the merry-go-round of knives and love fucked over.
***
Be Good, the bracing 2007 debut from Stacey May Fowles, is a novel internally divided.
And I mean that as the highest praise possible.
Following a small group of twenty-somethings (and one forty-something) as they drink and smoke and fuck and cut and let down and traumatize one another from one end of Canada to the other, Be Good is a novel of experiences—some more pleasant than others, all of them painted with brutal, sometimes-inebriated honesty.
Centred around Hannah and Morgan and their is-there-or-isn’t-there-I-wish-I-knew-what-to-think relationship, Be Good is cut into small snapshot chapters, presented in a non-linear fashion that reads less like a novel and more like a near-abstracted stream of memories—with all sides given voice. What’s even more interesting is the presence of an authorial diction to the narration, as if the memories of these broken-and-pieced-back-together-again individuals are all being filtered through the same lens, coalescing as one unseen narrator’s shared, abusive, neglectful, love-craving set of experiences.
The outcome of this is a work of multiple perspectives that reads as one person’s inability to accept what has happened, refusing to settle on a single, dogmatic perspective of the events at hand. This draws conflicting—but necessary—conclusions to the intentions of the presented voice: to offer an even hand to the relationships presented, showing all sides of how something can fall apart through so much unspoken vitriol; or to further illustrate the confusion and doubt one person can feel about their role—and the role of all others—in the total destruction of a relationship or series of relationships.
Be Good is a sometimes painful, always rewarding read. Fowles repeatedly intoxicates readers with imagery that straddles the tightrope between beautiful and horrific:
It was all so liberating until I held the very human consequences of it inside me like a weight that made me immobile, a weight I decided to name Archangel Gabriel until I felt it cramp and bleed out of me after I drowned it in vodka and disregard.
Abuse through poetic licence. Gorgeous and not, all at once.
Which describes Be Good at its core: a beautiful, tightly written work that will cut you with every pass of the merry-go-round of knives and love fucked over.
May 22, 2009
Fowles creates these characters (who perhaps, create each other) who completely dominant the page. I tore through this book not because it was an easy read but because I was absolutely absorbed by the drama, the lack-there-of, the fantasy and the blatent deceit of the characters to the reader. What sounds, on page, as a cliched look at the revolving relationships surrounding two former best friends (or were they ever really?) the chapters are full of ego, love, loathing and reluctance to change or be changed, only to change or allow change.
The book really feels as if it's merely the anecdotes of reality, and who's to say certain elements haven't been lifted while others created out of the sparkles of dust in the air.
Really, read this book, if only for the familiarity. You may have been here before.
The book really feels as if it's merely the anecdotes of reality, and who's to say certain elements haven't been lifted while others created out of the sparkles of dust in the air.
Really, read this book, if only for the familiarity. You may have been here before.
Read
August 26, 2016This review was deleted following Amazon's purchase of GoodReads.
The review can still be viewed via LibraryThing, where my profile can be found here.
I'm also in the process of building a database at Booklikes, where I can be found here.
If you read/liked/clicked through to see this review here on GR, many thanks.
The review can still be viewed via LibraryThing, where my profile can be found here.
I'm also in the process of building a database at Booklikes, where I can be found here.
If you read/liked/clicked through to see this review here on GR, many thanks.
February 18, 2021
luv how mx stacey writes but characters are insufferable
March 10, 2011
Reading for Canada Reads Independently 2011 at Pickle Me This
Ha! I loved this little book. Cranky about it being so "little" - as in number of pages - I wasn't ready for Hannah, Morgan, Estella, Jacob, Finn and Mr. Templeton to leave me just yet. In fact, I'm darned cranky about Cyndi Lauper. Poor Cyndi. She reminded me of the mouse that ran into the bathroom at work while one of our secretaries was in there doing her business. Oh the shrieks and commotion! The whole office came to her aid. Our secretary's not the mouse's. We were all intent on ridding our office of this atrocity. The mouse not our secretary. And we were all getting some pretty good swings at it with mops and brooms and such until one of the men, animal lover that he is, called a halt to the proceedings insisting that there had to be a more humane way. He suggested we capture the beast and let it go outside. So, he dumped the sugar out of its plastic margarine container and offered it up to us for such purpose. When none of us were willing to get so close to the pint-sized monster so as to capture it therein, he did it himself and carried the beast into his office to allow it to recover from its ordeal. Said mouse did not recover though. No. Panicked as it was, it just ran round and round the circumference of the container until it had a heart attack and died. Poor thing. We all had a look at it - stray sugar crystals stuck between its toes and everything - and we felt bad. So I felt bad for Cyndi too. And for Hannah.
As I said, I loved this book. And I loved its characters, or at least the idea of them, so much so that I want to go hang out on the fire escape on St. Paul Ouest with them and tell lies and drink vodka and paint my nails when I turn twenty-five. And wear kitten heels. Oh crap. My twenties have long since passed me by and size ten feet probably look sasquatchy in kitten heels anyway.
I do love coming of age stories, especially those of women. But those I've always loved best were those about women in whom I saw myself. Those of Atwood and Munro and Laurence, most of which were written when I was a young woman myself. I don't see myself in Hannah and Morgan and especially not Estella. I don't think I've ever been as angsty as those three, as uncertain/certain as those three, or as deceitful, or as totally fucked up. At least, I don't think so.
But memory has a funny way about it, as Hannah and Morgan et al remind us. We remember mostly what we allow ourselves to remember unless the thing is so horrifyingly burned into our grey matter that we can't forget. Then sometimes we have to change a little something so we can live with ourselves and how we think we look to people whose opinion matters to us. Regardless of how or why or what we remember or choose to say, it becomes our gospel truth, even if it is not.
So I can say that while I loved living in the muck of these twenty-year-olds' lives
for 177 pages, and I was touched and moved by their vulnerability at times, I can also say that, to the best of my recollection, I really was not all that very much like them at that age. Thank goodness.
This was a beautifully crafted piece of work. A joy to read.
Ha! I loved this little book. Cranky about it being so "little" - as in number of pages - I wasn't ready for Hannah, Morgan, Estella, Jacob, Finn and Mr. Templeton to leave me just yet. In fact, I'm darned cranky about Cyndi Lauper. Poor Cyndi. She reminded me of the mouse that ran into the bathroom at work while one of our secretaries was in there doing her business. Oh the shrieks and commotion! The whole office came to her aid. Our secretary's not the mouse's. We were all intent on ridding our office of this atrocity. The mouse not our secretary. And we were all getting some pretty good swings at it with mops and brooms and such until one of the men, animal lover that he is, called a halt to the proceedings insisting that there had to be a more humane way. He suggested we capture the beast and let it go outside. So, he dumped the sugar out of its plastic margarine container and offered it up to us for such purpose. When none of us were willing to get so close to the pint-sized monster so as to capture it therein, he did it himself and carried the beast into his office to allow it to recover from its ordeal. Said mouse did not recover though. No. Panicked as it was, it just ran round and round the circumference of the container until it had a heart attack and died. Poor thing. We all had a look at it - stray sugar crystals stuck between its toes and everything - and we felt bad. So I felt bad for Cyndi too. And for Hannah.
As I said, I loved this book. And I loved its characters, or at least the idea of them, so much so that I want to go hang out on the fire escape on St. Paul Ouest with them and tell lies and drink vodka and paint my nails when I turn twenty-five. And wear kitten heels. Oh crap. My twenties have long since passed me by and size ten feet probably look sasquatchy in kitten heels anyway.
I do love coming of age stories, especially those of women. But those I've always loved best were those about women in whom I saw myself. Those of Atwood and Munro and Laurence, most of which were written when I was a young woman myself. I don't see myself in Hannah and Morgan and especially not Estella. I don't think I've ever been as angsty as those three, as uncertain/certain as those three, or as deceitful, or as totally fucked up. At least, I don't think so.
But memory has a funny way about it, as Hannah and Morgan et al remind us. We remember mostly what we allow ourselves to remember unless the thing is so horrifyingly burned into our grey matter that we can't forget. Then sometimes we have to change a little something so we can live with ourselves and how we think we look to people whose opinion matters to us. Regardless of how or why or what we remember or choose to say, it becomes our gospel truth, even if it is not.
So I can say that while I loved living in the muck of these twenty-year-olds' lives
for 177 pages, and I was touched and moved by their vulnerability at times, I can also say that, to the best of my recollection, I really was not all that very much like them at that age. Thank goodness.
This was a beautifully crafted piece of work. A joy to read.
November 10, 2014
"Be Good," is indeed a Canadian version of the concrete jungle. Fowles writes an incredibly incisive account of disaffected twenty somethings who are struggling to find their feet in a world they have grown up to believe is based on lies. They all have trust issues and fight to construct their own truths, however reliable or unreliable that may be. Yet this book doesn't quite cut a swathe through this fog of unreality and leave them in a more grounded position from where they began. Instead it borders on a shared cohort paranoia that everyone is out to fuck me over, so I'll either fuck myself over first or fuck them over first. It is like watching well drawn weak characters in a melodrama of their own making, made from their self absorbed and nihilistic points of view. You'll want to watch or read something lighter after this.
January 20, 2011
I enjoyed this book and Stacey May Fowles' writing style. I loved that it jumped around three major Canadian cities and each one was described in recognizable ways.
I did, however, feel that there were too many characters. The novel could have worked just as well if only the main two characters were given the narrative. Throwing in boyfriends, and roommates seemed like too much and it made it so the story did not feel complete. I felt that I was only given a glance at these characters and much more could have been done with them to make a more complete story.
Overall, for a first novel it was pretty good.
I did, however, feel that there were too many characters. The novel could have worked just as well if only the main two characters were given the narrative. Throwing in boyfriends, and roommates seemed like too much and it made it so the story did not feel complete. I felt that I was only given a glance at these characters and much more could have been done with them to make a more complete story.
Overall, for a first novel it was pretty good.
July 22, 2009
I'm a bit torn on whether to give this book a 4 or a 5. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and absolutely loved the book's style of flipping between narrators/points of view and the short, teasing chapters. I'm not sure that it all coalesced for me by the end, however – there were a few too many loose ends for my liking. Regardless, I still very much liked the book and already have Fowles' next book awaiting me at the library...
January 31, 2009
I really didn't like the characters in this book and flipping back and forth between their perspectives at each chapter made it hard for me to keep straight who was who. :(
I'd been excited by the fact that it was set in Canada - Montreal.
I'd been excited by the fact that it was set in Canada - Montreal.
February 17, 2010
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. I liked the poetic style and the Canadian settings, but ultimately felt it was a bit flat. I think I read some fabulous reviews of it and was expecting more.
Read
December 30, 2010I liked this book
July 22, 2011
my 19 year old self would have undoubtedly loved it. recommended for the hip, young adult woman in your life.
November 19, 2012
I enjoyed her writing and the unique style of storytelling she used.
October 7, 2013
Stacey May's characters gut me.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews