Alligator

by Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore's wickedly fresh first novel, a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year moves with the swiftness of an alligator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters mingling in contemporary St. John's, Newfoundland. St. John's is a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O'Connor country. Its denizens jostle one another in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption. Colleen is a seventeen-year-old would-be ecoterrorist, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive. Her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly s sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. And Frank, a young man whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from sociopathic Russian sailor Valentin, whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters. Alligator is a remarkable book, a suspenseful, heartfelt, and sexy story that examines the ruthlessly reptilian and painfully human sides of all of us.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Contemporary, Canadian Literature, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Novels

306 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Lisa Moore has written two collections of stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, as well as a novel, Alligator.

Open and Alligator were both nominated for the Giller Prize. Alligator won the Commonwealth Prize for the Canadian Caribbean Region and the ReLit Award, and Open won the Canadian Authors' Association Jubilee Prize for Short Fiction.

Lisa has also written for television, radio, magazines (EnRoute, The Walrus and Chatelaine) and newspapers (The Globe and Mail and The National Post).

Lisa has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She also studied at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she became a member of The Burning Rock Collective, a group of St. John's writers.

Reviews

[Brian]

The nice thing about unravelling a Sudoku is: in the end it either fits or it doesn't; if a mistake has been made, whether by a careless realignment or a lapse in logic, it's clear that I've got it wrong. When trying to put together the shards of Lisa Moore's Alligator the solution does not appear upside down after the acknowledgements. I may have it wrong. Embarrassingly so. But the writing so deliciously excites the imagination paragraph after paragraph that I feel like I can't be alone in wanting there to be some trail of breadcrumbs to a real story. Moore makes me green with envy with her razor sharp delineation of characters, her dance along the tightrope of emphasis or effect—precision or excess. Where does she come up with these backgrounds, these descriptions, these deafening understatements that end almost every scene? It can't be accidental, then, that only one of the many character vignettes is actually written in the first person: that of Colleen, the teenage rebel. It is Colleen that gives shape to her mother, her aunt, to a young hot dog vendor, his assailant, Frank's friends, an alligator farm proprietor, and others. And while, for a reason I cannot fathom, Colleen is not given the final (or even one of the final eight) voices in the book, she is, in the end, finally nudged back onto a hopeful path. She is neither eaten nor alienated nor dedicated to a life of crime and that, perhaps, is as much as anyone can wish for a teenager in the post-modern world.

[Geoff Seymour · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like it, I really wanted to like it but I just didn't find any of the characters likeable. I think each chapter is very well written, and I think as a series of short stories it could be a decent collection but as a novel I found the lack of continuity between chapters jarring. The subject of each chapter shifts between characters, and because I really didn't like any of them, I found it difficult to keep track of what was happening to whom. I also felt let down by the lack of resolution at the end... The quality of the writing is technically very good but I found it impossible to be engaged in the stories.

[Ɛɾιɳ ẞҽҽ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Alligator so much. It's not perfect -there are certainly a few things that some would find offensive- but I don't understand why the average rating isn't higher. Lisa Moore is my favourite contemporary fiction author. Like Moore, I was born and raised in Newfoundland, so the Newfoundland setting drew me in and definitely adds to the appeal for me, but my appreciation for her books goes so much further than that. Her unique style embodies everything that I adore and her characters feel so alive, as if I know them in real life. I don't know how she does it but oh my gosh. My little Newfie heart is madly in love with, and in awe of, her writing.

Full review to come (maybe).

View of St. John's Harbour and The Narrows ♡

[Allyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author has a true gift for place description and feelings laid out so evocatively, but her style of chapter intercutting is too annoying. I really would love to read a novel she writes fluidly, rather than jumping around back and forth, person to person, year to year. It is frustrating and I am not sure why I cannot accept her strategy except that I see it as a weakness in a writer, rather than a strength.
These characters were more interesting than February but I am curious whether I would have found the opposite had I read Alligator first, followed by February.
Either way her characters are completely real and engrossing and I would have liked both books so much more had they been traditionally paced.
Maybe I am being unfair and should simply accept her style and appreciate it- not sure.

[Kristine Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this book from the library shelf because of it's alluring cover. Lisa Moore is a very skilled writer. Her ability to describe the details of ordinary things is amazing. Many authors can do this, and somehow Moore describes things you have seen yourself, can identify with immediately, so it feels almost as if you are reading about your own memories. For example, at the beginning of the second chapter: "...the warm night breeze jostles the handful of forget-me-nots sitting in a Mason jar of yellowish water on the windowsill. A few petals move on the surface of the water like tiny boats on a still lake. The glass jar and the submerged flower stems are coated with silvery beads of air...(and at the end of the chapter)...several air bubbles on the stems of the flowers in the Mason jar floated to the surface and broke soundlessly. The breeze nudged the flowers into one another and the stems tippytoed across the bottom of the jar."

Each chapter is written from the perspective on the main characters (Beverley, Colleen, Frank and Madeleine). Again this is a technique used by many authors these days (don't know the technical term for it, but it is one I tend to like). In this novel, each chapter can almost stand on it's own as a short story, and when you've finished reading the entire book, you feel as if you've read 4 novels - each character's story is compelling on it's own... and yet of course they are all interconnected.

[Michael Belcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have rarely had such a visceral reaction to a book as I did with "Alligator." Closing the book after finishing, I felt a seething anger towards life, which was mixed with a sublime terror not unlike what that moment right before being attacked by a slithering, obscured reptile must feel like. There are instances of empathetic humanity in the novel, but the undercurrent is of a pervading thoughtlessness that spins progressively out of control. The characters cause each other immense pain and never truly get a chance to make amends, even if they want to. Instead, we leave the novel with the breath knocked out of us - both by the cinematic exactitude of Moore's ravaging prose and the all-encompassing maw of that alligator right under the surface of things, ready to strike.

[Paula · Rating 1 out of 5]

So detailed and evocative in its sentences, yet so scattered and plot-less in its story! I'm not a fan of train-of-thought novels, and I had to force myself to finish it. I will say that being a Newfoundlander, I liked the setting, but it unnerved me that the source of all evil-doing originated in Hr Grace. Ha!

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel of a first novel! Love the style, the writing...more later! In the meantime, highly recommended.

[MargaretDH · Rating 3 out of 5]

This layered novel is made up multiple perspective chapters and takes place mostly in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Moore is wonderful writer of character and setting, and each chapter is delicately and crisply composed. But. As a whole, I'm not sure I entirely understand what she was trying to do here. Things are pretty unrelentingly bleak for all the characters, and I guess maybe Moore is just trying to remind us that all systems tend towards decay.

This won't dissaude me from reading any other Moore books (I loved February), and there are some excellent examples of inner monologue in here. Even though I enjoyed the individual chapters as they came to me, that enjoyment was undermined by feeling a little cold and meh when I finally finished the book.

[Penelopeann · Rating 2 out of 5]

So much back & forth in time and with characters. Confusing.
No real ending. Mostly sad. Not what I expected from a book set in Newfoundland.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since I cried and snuffled my way through February, I was really looking forward to reading Alligator, and perhaps I was expecting too much, especially since this book was Lisa Moore's first novel. I didn't find the multiple first person narratives and time jumping particularly confusing (which seems to be the chief complaint from other readers), in fact the time shifting in February and Open was a definite stylistic point in their favour, but here the complicated structure came off as masking more sizzle than steak.

Even in this early work, Moore writes some lovely bits I enjoyed rereading, such as:

The anticipation of the hurling mass of the next wave, which is cold and mounting triumphantly and about crotch high, is huge, and if this wave hits her she's getting all the way in. Like the world exhaling. A hammering home of the truth. A refusal to be a wave any longer. The wave accepts the absurdity of being a wave, but also recognises the beach for what it is: a reckoning. Who said it would go on forever?

Nobody said.

They said quite the opposite.

There is no cold on earth as unequivocal as this wave that is higher than her head and about to smash itself against her skull. It is as cold as cold can be. Because how can matter be so blasted with sunlight, so sparkle-riven, and curve with such blood lust and be so soul numbing? A wave is the bone around the marrow of light.



"A wave is the bone around the marrow of light." That took some figuring out, but I enjoyed rolling it on my tongue. I think what's nagging at me is the bleakness of everyone's situation in this book, that everyone will eventually be hit by the bone around the marrow of light, be attacked by the alligator that is lurking for each of us. And in the imagery, this notion felt a little heavy-handed. Did anyone not lose at least one parent at some point?


Illustrative of this:


She had come to think of life not as a progression of days full of minor dramas, some tragedies, small joys, and carefully won accomplishments, as she figures most people think of life -- but rather a stillness that would occasionally be interrupted by blasts of chaos.


And more so:


The water was deep and I screamed and I could feel weeds clinging to my jeans and he hauled the boat in and I tried to get onto the little island of mud he was on but the land kept giving way under me and he jumped onto the boat and I saw an alligator slide off the shore.

I had not seen it before and then I saw it. I thought I saw it. A shape that sank almost below the surface, just the ridge of its back visible, gliding quickly toward me. It moved with the same slow-fastness that things in dreams move with, it dipped under the surface but the wake, a soft V in the water, plaiting itself behind some invisible thing coming my way.

And then he had me in the boat. He reached over the side and hauled me up, which, how he lifted me I don't know. I lost a shoe and he was screaming how stupid I was how crazy and stupid and he stopped and he got me a blanket and he was crying with his face all screwed up with rage, tears rolling down his cheeks, and then he just stood over me patting the blanket and he stared for thirty seconds or so and I said his name and he didn't hear me and then he started shouting at me again. How stupid I was.

I said but there weren't any alligators around. There weren't any around, I screamed back at him and I was crying too, and when I said that there weren't any alligators around, there was a whack against the side of the boat.


Ah, so the teenage girl has been behaving recklessly because, due to her youth and protective upbringing, she didn't yet realise that the alligators are always lurking? It's a small complaint, no doubt compounded by my big expectations, and I will gladly read anything Lisa Moore comes up with next.

[Buchdoktor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Der Plot erinnert an Rätsel im Stil: Wenn Petra im roten Haus wohnt und Tim einen Hund hat, wie heisst dann der Vater von Emma? Lisa Moores Roman spielt in St. Johns/Neufundland und deckt nach und nach die Beziehungen zwischen zahlreichen Figuren auf. Frank ist Waise und lebt von den Einkünften seines Hotdog-Imbisswagens. Er wohnt im gleichen Haus mit Valentin, einem furchterregenden Russen, der auf Neufundland gestrandet ist, weil der kanadische Staat das Schiff bechlagnahmte, auf dem Valentin Dienst tat. Colleen ist eine pubertierende Umweltaktivistin, die mit allen Mitteln den Lebensraum des Neufundländer Fichtenmarders vor der Abholzung bewahren will. Colleens Patentante arbeitet als Filmemacherin und hat einmal einen Spot über einen Krokodilbändiger gedreht. Nachdem Colleen Ärger mit der Polizei bekommen hat und zu Sozialstunden als Schadensausgleich verurteilt wurde, haut sie nach Louisiana ab, um den Krokodilbändiger aus Madeleines Film zu besuchen. Valentin hat sich ins Leben seiner Vermieterin Carol eingenistet und will sie um Haus und Vermögen bringen. Er sucht Veränderungen, behauptet er. Das Auftreten sehr vieler Personen in einem Roman erinnert an Winesburg, Ohio und begeistert als einziges Alleinstellungsmerkmal eines Buches noch nicht. Lisa Moore ist zweifellos eine begabte Erzählerin. Bei mir ist der Funke zu ihren in "Im Rachen des Alligators" äußerst knapp skizzierten Figuren einfach nicht übergesprungen, weil mir bei jeder der Figuren das Motiv für deren Handeln fehlte.

[Jovdb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terribly disappointed on this book.

I read February and picked it as the winner of the Canada Reads competition in 2013 and was delighted to find this book at the library. But I found it confusing and rather bizarre.

There are ten (?) characters in the book. Each has their own story to tell. They are all loosely connected to Colleen either directly, or because she knows a character that then interconnects with another character. But it just didn’t click with me.

None of the characters were really likeable, except maybe Frank, but they were all vulnerable and a bit pathetic. Colleen herself was an awful teenager.

The writing was a little strange in that everything was itself and not itself, like the wave that was a curl but could never be a curl! What? Really? Maybe I missed the point if this contradictory reflection - everything is only real if it accepts that it is and isn’t? Who knows?

Sorry that I didn’t like this. Maybe because it was a first novel? It seemed, as others have mentioned, like a series of essays loosely linked but no real plot line.

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too choppy, too disconnected, too many stories, too many characters. The book jumped around far too much to hold my attention, and the less attention I paid the less I liked it. My memory of it now is much like a black-and-white newsreel on fast forward, with no chance to grasping enough of any one scene to understand what was happening. Perhaps the author described her own writing technique when she described the process of acting, on page 294: “That is acting: the alchemy of absence and presence. Embody the character, agree there is no character; there’s only a series of linked gestures, fudged acts, reprieves.”

FAVOURITE QUOTE: “He told her he loved her and the words tumbled down the drunken, bottomless well of her with a somber finality.” [p. 209]

[Crystal Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book while I had the flu and actually found it to be a pretty quick read. I like Lisa Moore's writing however this book didn't feel like a complete novel to me but rather a series of short vignettes. It was told from at least 7 different peoples' points of view and while I normally love that type of style this book never really came together for me. I enjoyed reading from Coleen and Frank's point of view the most and wish that Moore would have focused on just their points of view and introduced the other characters as secondary characters.

No one in my book club rated this book a five star, and most everyone had the same feeling about the book not feeling whole.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life has you in its teeth. You can either submit or you can fight.

Everyone in this story is passionate, broken, and resolute. The 17-year-old Colleen outwardly wants to save the earth, inwardly is bent on her own destruction. Frank loses his mother to cancer, leaving him alone in the world. She has extracted his promise to go to college, so he works every night at his hot dog cart to save tuition money. Colleen’s mother Beverly slogs through each day, four years into her sudden widowhood. Madeleine forgoes life-saving heart surgery to complete the pinnacle of her film career. Valentin, the Russian sailor, makes his way in a foreign city with cunning charm and violence.

Moore handles her sizable cast with a deft rhythm. She starts off with the four main characters, three related by blood. It’s a manageable number of psyches for the reader to keep track of, along with back stories, longings, regrets, and current struggles. Then she adds the villain and sends him after one of the four. Five more supporting players enter and leave. By the end, we are left with the four original characters, the villain and one of his victims.

Her character descriptions are a delightful mix of the physical and the emotional. They are efficient and vivid, never slowing the plot. Here, for example, is Frank remembering his dance teacher from childhood:

“Dr. Callahan had one tooth in front that was grey, and the tooth frightened Frank because Dr. Callahan had said it was dead. Everything was in the tooth: all of Dr. Callahan’s fight against despair and his private, mystical arguments with God and the complicated love he had for tap dancing.”

All the characters are living this truth: loss and grief and change are relentless and unmerciful. The worst can—and often does—happen. Even so, wonder is still possible, and sudden insight. Colleen, late in the book:

“I knelt down near the fence and looked into the eye of a giant alligator that was very near the fence. The alligator did not move and did not move. I saw myself kneeling in its eye and I was tiny and fragile-looking in a long velvet tunnel and I wasn’t ever coming back from there.”

Moore uses a technique of weaving as many as five strands of narrative together, toggling back and forth between them in a chapter or paragraph, sometimes even a single sentence. Past, present, and future roll around as if we are inside the character’s head, flitting from one topic to another. It is simultaneously realistic and stylized, illuminating rather than distracting. Each of the characters comes into focus this way: through immediate action, memory, fantasy, inaction, deeper memory, conflict. There is no way to give an example without going into a long set-up of the various threads. You’ll just have to read the book.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Lisa Moore is also a visual artist, a painter. She has a prodigious ability to notice. I picture her going through the world with eyes wide open, heart scooping up moments, filing them away for later. This book is full of lovingly observed details, used with restraint and purpose. A single object or article of clothing conveys everything about a character. Interiors shimmer with meaning. Landscapes come alive in color, texture, sound, and smell. A few examples:

“There was a whole history of resignation and maxed-out credit cards in her ugly sweater.”

“She’d turned off the radio before sitting down, and the house became utterly silent. She braced against the silence the way a downhill skier might draw breath before starting down a hill.”

“Waves travel a long distance without effort. They curl because they cannot not curl. Because when a wave is punched in the gut it caves. Because a wave is all show and no substance. The curdling spew rushes ahead. Foam scribbling over the sand, a note to say the wave is over. Because the glare on the water is in Sanskrit. . . . if this wave hits her she’s getting all the way in. Like the world exhaling. A hammering home of the truth. A refusal to be a wave any longer. The wave accepts the absurdity of being a wave, but also recognizes the beach for what it is: a reckoning. Who said it would go on forever?”

These passages are never used gratuitously. The one about waves, for example, accompanies a character’s own reckoning. We have felt her struggle to reconcile her tendency to move through life without resistance. And now it has led her to a devastating turn, via an encounter with a man who seems compelled to exploit and destroy people.

Moore’s portrait of St. John’s, Newfoundland, grounds the action and characters in place. The city and its residents emerge as background to the action: the harbor with its connection to the wider world, cruise ships, bar scenes, tourists, arbitration for youthful offenders, a grimy haunted bedsit, logging ancient forests, endangered species, social services, police, foster care, hospitals, an infestation of elm spanworms. The filmmaker, Madeleine, frets about a shipment of Austrian horses that is stuck in transit, iced in before it can reach the harbor. Moore proves herself equally able to paint other settings, as Colleen makes a foray to the Florida swamps.

As I neared the end of the book, I wondered how on earth she would be able to wrap up all the narratives. Their clashes and conflicts had been building, the characters becoming more desperate and driven, the pace picking up. Moore did not disappoint. She thrusts her characters into the worst of it, and brings us in there with them. In the best scene, we waken with Frank from drug-induced unconsciousness into a wild conflagration, with all attendant confusion, smells, and the panic of being burned alive. Every arc climaxes with the others in a very satisfying way, in some cases with a bit of wiggle room left for interpretation and speculation.

The writer, Hubert Selby Jr., whose novels include "Last Exit to Brooklyn" and "Requiem for a Dream," said he wanted to put the reader through an emotional experience. To that end, he worked consciously to stay out of the way in his writing. He believed firmly that the writer has no right to put himself between the people in the story and the reader.

Lisa Moore’s craft has a similar effect. Her language is scrumptious, by turns visual, concrete, lush, ephemeral and suggestive. There is pathos and humor, violence and sex and love. Her range and inventiveness are astonishing. And yet, somehow, her words are not showy. They don’t get between the characters and the reader. We have full access to their emotional lives, are invited in to relationship with them, and, ultimately, empathy.

[Nicole A · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the writing style of this author, but the story was one that had a different character perspective for each chapter, and it took me til about 2/3 through the book to really follow who was who and what was happening. Made it harder to grt into the story.

[Terry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I was prepared for unique Newfoundland characters but was disappointed. These characters were not unique, they were mostly boring. The last one hundred pages was better than the first 200.

[Miodrag Milovanović · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probao sam...

[Joanne Seitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed Lisa Moore's "February" which is a novel about the Ocean Ranger sinking and its effect in St John's Nfld. But this book - which is also set in St. John's - is beautiful. There were pages where I thought I would like to take out paragraphs and frame them, her writing is so lovely. The characters and their relationships are complex and non-derivative. Loved it.

[BookLovingLady (deceased Jan. 25, 2023...) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jigsaw pieces... Before you start piecing them together to see the bigger picture, that's what Alligator reminded me of most.

The book is written using different viewpoints and the ‘chapters’ are named after the character who is giving the reader his or her part of the story. It is not always clear from the start of a new chapter how a character will fit into the story and this intrigued me, because I knew there would be a connection with one or more of the other characters sooner or later.

When I’d finished reading the book I did a quick count and it turns out Colleen and Frank are the ones who are telling the story most often. Odd, because I would have said Madeleine, had anyone asked me. Madeleine’s story clearly made more of an impression on me than the stories of Colleen and Frank. Both Mr Duffy and Valentin are equally represented when it comes to the number of times their viewpoints are given but Mr Duffy’s story didn’t make any impression on me whatsoever. Valentin’s did though. So again: Odd. But fascinating... I do realize, by the way, that simply counting the number of times a character appears as a chapter doesn't quite do it, as the chapters vary in length enormously, the shortest one being less than a page long.

In total there are ten different characters whose point of view is used to write the story. In the end, all of their stories fit nicely together to form the bigger picture. Cleverly done...

For a review in Dutch, see message 69 of the Autumn challenge 2014 of the Netherlands & Flanders group.

[Eliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

12/31/2010: Because I loved Lisa Moore's second novel (February) so much, I wanted to read Alligator, her first. (Before Alligator, she published two volumes of short stories.) And I'm glad I did, as I loved seeing not only how much Moore has grown and developed between the two novels, but also what has remained consistent.
Alligator is told by multiple narrators who are each somehow linked to at least two of the other narrators. This narrative form can sometimes be confusing, especially if you're not reading carefully (wait, this Madeleine is also the Madeleine who is Colleen's aunt! Oh!) but it serves its purpose well, which is to emphasize each character's particular mode of isolation. There's a teenaged girl in a phase of lostness; a psychopathic Russian sailor out to make a buck; a mentally limited young man; and a dying filmmaker (among others!). In a style similar to "Crash", relationships are made among the characters, all dysfunctional and frustrating to watch as the story unfolds. I kept wanting to jump in to the narrative and translate for the characters, somehow get through their inability to communicate to one another.
Moore's amazing ability to summon up an entire scene or character with one or two details is present here, though it is not as finely honed as in February. And her vision is darker here, without the redemptive quality of her later book. I'm just glad she is still writing, and I am looking forward to her next work (as well as her short stories--such a different genre, I can't wait to see how she does it).

[Mariele · Rating 2 out of 5]

The polyphonic style can be a great choice to tell a story. Not here though. I was continually thrown off course with all those POV switches, the sketchily rendered characters and their jumpy line of thoughts. I also did not find myself being even moderately interested in any of them. It felt more like a collection of short stories than a novel. The sum of its parts never came together, even though the characters are in some way connected to each other.

In the end, I thought that the book failed to make a point. This is why I don’t usually read any contemporary fiction – it’s not telling me anything new. A good book should provide some form of escapism. "Alligator" doesn't, though. It’s about commonplace problems that I see around me in my daily life aplenty. Not even the sense of place is a strong theme.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's all beautiful bits of writing. Each chapter a finely wrought gem. There's a beautiful chapter on a failed marriage, a forgotten bottle of champagne, scribbling a script at stop lights and a car dying in the snow with her son in the back. The pages are filled with cyphers and symbols. As a whole it just doesn't feel like it's moving anywhere. Titling it Alligator and opening with the image of the alligator farmhand left me holding onto that thread for most of the book waiting for the payoff. It never really comes.

[Wanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a bizarre exercise in stream of consciousness writing, this novel seems to lack substance until somehow, something clicks and the structure is thrown into stark relief. I was especially compelled by the dynamism of these relationships, how subtly the struggle between love, disappointment, fear, and hate played out throughout the network of characters. I admit that I found this narrative style to be outside of my comfort zone, and so the regret I feel in finishing any book was here tinged with relief.

[Erin Reads Rants Raves · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 / 5
It took me awhile to warm up to this book but once I did, I found the characters and their interwoven plot lines compelling.
This is a beautifully crafted character - driven story about a group of people whose lives butt up against each other. These people will stay with me for a long time.

[Vicki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have no idea what this book was. Just shitty and crass characters painting an ugly portrait of St. John's. I didn't care for the zigzaggy writing, it felt too contemporary and artificial. It wasn't that bad, I just prefer a bit more straightforwardness. I'm not put off Lisa Moore, I'd still like to read February, but this one wasn't for me.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

What to say about this book? It was an okay read, although I wouldn't recommend it. Lisa Moore's writing style is interesting and unusual.
The many stories from many characters past and present blend better than I would have thought. It was a fair book. Not a great one.

[Corinne Wasilewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about survival and how some of us live for love and others of us live to run from love but it's love that drives us either way. I found the book easy to read and hard to put down.

[Hannah McLean · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t feel like it had a point. Well written and I enjoyed the style but I got to the end and felt like…there was no point to this book or the characters.