Bottle Rocket Hearts

by Zoe Whittall

Welcome to '90s Montreal. It's been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1897151063
• ISBN13: 9781897151068
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Cormorant Books
• Length: 189 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

a sort of creative autobiography for those who have tried to live in uncharted territory

If I were to describe Bottle Rocket Hearts as a sort of creative autobiography replete with journal excerpts and a first person narrator, which also reads like a queer coming of age novel, you probably wouldn't want to read it. But for anyone who has ever tried to align their politics with their personal life and discovered a plethora of limits and contradictions, this book will be a fun, fast-paced read. And it has punk rock bulging from the seams and postmodern emotional conundrums that will resonate with those who have tried to live in uncharted territory. Having read Zoe Whittal's tightly crafted tale, I've had to reassess my position on the idea that diaries are cheesy and coming of age novels are boring. Bottle Rocket Hearts suggests otherwise. The narrative follows Eve - an eighteen-year-old lesbian living in the suburbs of Montreal - through her first "Revolutionary Relationship" with Della who thinks Eve is older than she is. We witness Eve's multifarious developments: her attempt to forge a new community of "queers and artists and adulthood;" get an apartment downtown; make mixed tapes; do drugs; get and lose a job, friends and a girlfriend. She becomes an activist and has ridiculous pangs of jealousy when the girlfriend's ex (aptly named XXXX because "her name is too evil to write or say out loud") makes an appearance to narrator Eve's "most insecure moments." I found Whittal's descriptions of the latter to be refreshingly bang-on, treated with a fantastic sense of humour and the distinct awareness of the ironies at play: "intellectually non-monogamy made complete sense; emotionally it felt like sand-paper across my eyelids." And this is one of my favorite lines: "The trouble with deciding not to define anything is that it usually means you have to talk a lot more about what you're not defining than you would if you employed the time-honoured grade nine approach to Going Steady." We find out early on that for the narrator "people who journal always seem more grounded" and, later on, "the difference between fiction and non is almost arbitrary." In a sense, the changes found in the narrator's attitudes towards writing, starting from a position where the diary represents a space for grounding thoughts (i.e., transparency, honesty) to the realization that truth and fiction are (unfortunately) difficult to discern, also marks out the space of her coming of age, personally and as an author. And coming of age is probably a convenient misnomer in this case, because Bottle Rocket Hearts is more about the negotiations involved in coming into an identity, a process that is arguably endless and nuanced rather than fixed and simple. "'Femme.' I mouthed it to myself, giggling. 'Okay.' For some reason this sounded good, like it fit more than any other moniker hoisted on me like queer, lesbian, bi, whatever. None of those felt right. Femme. Okay, that works."

Enchanting.

An original tale written in a unique voice. Eve is a young woman coming of age and coming out at the same time, the results of which are well explored in this beautifully written narrative. Eve meets Della, an older lesbian whom charms her young self into a passionate love affair, Eve's first. Issues like homophobia and jealousy are explored in detail amid a backdrop of an alternative lifestyle set in 90's Montreal, complete with rallies and murder, music and art. The main character is fully realized and completely lovable with her lethal combination of vulnerability and strength. The other characters too, read real and alive, especially her roomate Seven, a gay struggling with his HIV status and joie de vivre. Through tragedy and love, Eve comes to learn that everyone is in possession of a "bottle rocket heart"..."common, sturdy, but still potentially explosive". An amazing talent.