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The Girl Who Was Saturday Night: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Heather O'Neill (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 563 ratings
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An enchanting story of twins, fame, and heartache by the much-praised author of Lullabies for Little Criminals


Heather O'Neill charmed readers in the hundreds of thousands with her sleeper hit, Lullabies for Little Criminals, which documented with a rare and elusive magic the life of a young dreamer on the streets of Montreal. Now, in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she returns to the grubby, enchanted city with a light and profound tale of the vice of fame and the ties of family.

Nineteen years old, free of prospects, and inescapably famous, the twins Nicolas and Nouschka Tremblay are trying to outrun the notoriety of their father, a French-Canadian Serge Gainsbourg with a genius for the absurd and for winding up in prison. "Back in the day, he could come home from a show with a paper bag filled with women's underwear. Outside of Québec nobody had even heard of him, naturally. Québec needed stars badly."

Since the twins were little, Étienne has made them part of his unashamed seduction of the province, parading them on talk shows and then dumping them with their decrepit grandfather while he disappeared into some festive squalor. Now Étienne is washed up and the twins are making their own almost-grown-up messes, with every misstep landing on the front pages of the tabloid Allo Police. Nouschka not only needs to leave her childhood behind; she also has to leave her brother, whose increasingly erratic decisions might take her down with him.

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  1. Print length
    416 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  5. Publication date
    June 3, 2014
  6. File size
    1063 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The girl of the title is Nouschka Tremblay; she and her twin brother, Nicholas, are the 19-year-old children of Étienne Tremblay, a once-famous folksinger and composer who, though his career is now in eclipse, is still celebrated. The twins, high-school dropouts and adrift, are famous, too, their every move reported in the tabloids. Set in Montreal in the 1990s, the story, told by Nouschka, follows her attempts to straighten out her life even as her brother’s becomes ever more erratic. Raised by their elderly grandfather, the twins live together on the edge of poverty, and Nicholas has resorted to petty thievery to support himself. Meanwhile, Nouschka has become a student in night school, hoping to receive her high-school diploma, go on to college, and become a writer. Her plans are interrupted when she falls in love with Raphael, who may be schizophrenic. Complications ensue. O’Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals, 2006) has written a marvelously intriguing novel of a family in dissolution, each member of which is richly and memorably characterized. A secondary theme involving the Quebec separatist movement evokes the possible separation of the intense bond that has characterized the twins’ lives. The book is beautifully written, particularly rich in simile and metaphor (“The pink clouds in the sky were delicates soaking in the sink”; “The notes from the piano were like raindrops falling on the lake”). Compulsively readable, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is a delight for any night. --Michael Cart

Review

“A unique, urgent and edgy voice. Wry on the one hand, sometimes tragic on the other. . . .This is a rollicking novel about sad child stars coming of age, with a political twist.” — NOW Magazine

“O’Neill’s unique strength as a prose stylist has always been in the strength of her individual sentences, and in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, the way she wields an image feels less like style than superpower.” — National Post

“The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is Heather O’Neill’s second novel, and it is the book where she emerges as a fully-formed artist.” — The Globe and Mail

“O’Neill’s language . . . is what I find so beguiling about her work. Similes blow up the ordinary. Hyperbole extends throughout . . . O’Neill exceeds at inventing a place where magic really happens, where the mundane came become extraordinary.” — The Rumpus.com

“No one’s depiction of the shady side of life is as luminous - or as heart-wrenching - as Heather O’Neill’s.” — Nancy Huston, award-winning author of Fault Lines

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00GVRE75K
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 3, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 3, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1063 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 563 ratings

About the author

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Heather O'Neill

Heather O'Neill

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
563 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

jennifer
5.0 out of 5 stars love ❤️
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2023
Verified Purchase
Jesus Christ, this author is amazing. I did not expect to enjoy this book as much as I did “Lullabies for little criminals.” That was a tough one to follow. This book was just as beautiful and heart wrenching.
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LyndaT
4.0 out of 5 stars I really enjoyed The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2015
Verified Purchase
I really enjoyed The Girl Who Was Saturday Night. This book, about a Quebecois brother and sister, told a unique story that I found hard to put down. I'm fascinated that it was written by an Anglophone writer and want to learn more about Heather O'Neill's background and why she felt she could tell this story. My only complaint was the excessive use of metaphor, which I excused and attributed to the book being written in the first person by a budding writer (not sure if this was the author's intent). Highly recommended.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Absurd and beautiful
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2018
Verified Purchase
Heather O'Neill creates a rich picture of Quebec during the tumultuous period of the 1995 referendum by telling the story of Nouschka Tremblay, a young woman looking for some kind of direction in the midst of a severely dysfunctional family. In doing so, O'Neill vividly describes a world where everything is a little absurd, often darkly funny, yet moving. This isn't a typical coming of age story; the protagonist is a little older than is typical for that. Still, we see a young woman who, deprived of any real parenting as a child, grows up in a hurry when adulthood is forced on her.

At her core, O'Neill is a superb storyteller with magnificent characters and settings to make the mundane remarkable.
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Sandra Woodcock
3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2014
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Author has a marvelous turn of phrase, intriguing insights into Quebec culture, but uneccessary inane sexual stories.
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Polly Darton
5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely second novel
Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2015
Verified Purchase
Heather O'Neill's first novel Lullabies for Little Criminals is one of my all time favorites, so I was overjoyed when this finally came out. The writing style and general vibe is thankfully similar. Her writing is gut wrenching and beautiful. She definitely has a way with metaphors and describing ordinary things to make them magical. She is great at creating interesting characters. Fans of Lullabies will like this book.
One person found this helpful
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MS
4.0 out of 5 stars My least favorite of her 3 novels, but still a wild ride
Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2019
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I am in love with her writing, it is like a crazy person telling you a story. Her analogies all only half make sense and her POV character loves gritty sad things but everyone’s screwed up and crazy and poor and dressed like 1960s big city kids saying quebecois swear words and writing poetry. Lots of fun.
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robt
5.0 out of 5 stars Expect the unexpected
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2019
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I read every book I can get by this author. If you haven't read anything by her you're in for a tête-à-tête.
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ellyn
2.0 out of 5 stars Two Stars
Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2015
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This book was ok but very repetitive
At times hard to read as it didn't hold my attention
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Top reviews from other countries

Scintillant
5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic and compulsive
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2017
Verified Purchase
I love the language this writer uses. Her way of looking at the world is mind-altering. A gifted writer - a little surreal, in the way that most people's lives are.
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Janet B
5.0 out of 5 stars A HEART-WRENCHING STORY!
Reviewed in Canada on May 21, 2015
Verified Purchase
When Etienne Tremblay had a fling with a teenager named Lily Saint-Marie, she became pregnant and later gave birth to twins, Nicolas and Nouschka. The young mother found it too much to handle, so she left them on the doorstep of their grandparents apartment. Their grandmother died and it was their grandfather, Loulou, who raised them.

Their father, Etienne Tremblay, was a famous Quebecois folksinger. It was the time of the quiet revolution in Quebec. The more stars there were in Quebec, the better the argument the French had for having their own culture. Throughout their childhood, Etienne used the twins as props. He dressed them up, wrote things for them to say on talk shows and they became little Quebecois stars. Etienne took them all over to boost his career and to show the Quebecois people that he was a true and loyal separatist. The French people fell in love with the twins. When their father was done with them, he dumped them with their grandfather. Etienne was in and out of his children's lives. He was living the fast life. He was drinking, womanizing, getting into trouble and landing in jail.

The story takes place in Montreal from the 1970s to the 1990s. Nouschka is telling the story of their lives. The family lived in the east end of the city, where the French people lived. They were on welfare. The area was full of wild cats, because of the rats and wherever there was an open window, a cat climbed in. There was always a cat or two in the apartment. The twins slept together nude in the same bed. They loved each other, but they were always in each others business. It was a love/hate relationship.

They both dropped out of school, although Nouschka had second thoughts. Loulou, their grandfather, spoke to them about staying in school, but he couldn't get through to Nicolas. He had no goals and he was always getting into trouble and it was landing him on the front pages of the tabloids like Allo Police. He was already a father to Pierrot, but he was not allowed to see him. Nicolas didn't have a job and didn't support his child.

The Quebecois girls had a reputation for being easy bait. When school was out, there were bus loads and trains full of young men coming to Montreal from the U.S. and Ontario, to have a wild time with the pretty French girls. Boulevard St. Laurent was the place to go. There were strip bars along the entire block.

Nicolas and Nouschka were now 19 years old. Nouschka was dating a guy named Raphael. He was a figure skater. He was a strange guy and Nicolas hated him. He felt his sister could do much better. Nouschka realized that now was the time to do something constructive with her life. It was Nouschka who had to make the first move, which meant leaving her brother. Life would now change for the Tremblay family.

Heather O'Neill has written a sad story about the children of a once famous Quebecois folksinger and how they have to adjust to growing older and leaving the past behind. Her writing is effortless and beautiful. The characters are so real and true to life. Her description of the vibrant city of Montreal in the east end among the French people with their joie de vivre and the political situation, which screams "vivre le Quebec libre" is remarkable.

I loved this book and give it FIVE STARS.
3 people found this helpful
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ELLEN M POVIN
4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent read. Your attention is caught almost immediately
Reviewed in Canada on September 4, 2014
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An excellent read. Your attention is caught almost immediately. Descriptions of living in East End Montreal is reality accurate. Montreal is a beautiful city, My reaction of the story. No matter what life hands you, with necessity and will power, you can succeed do something with your life.
One person found this helpful
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ab
4.0 out of 5 stars Surprising, emotional and beautiful
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2015
Verified Purchase
I initially bought this book, having not read anything about it, expecting it to be a light read. Instead, it turned out to be beautiful, heart-aching and emotional. I am so glad I saw this book and shall be recommending it to friends.
3 people found this helpful
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Stephanie
5.0 out of 5 stars Great
Reviewed in Canada on January 21, 2022
Verified Purchase
Great condition, better than expected.
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