Rating: 4/5
Blurb (taken from Goodreads):
Wildly funny and wonderfully moving, Bad Ideas is about just that — a string of bad ideas — and the absurdity of love
Trudy works nights in a linen factory, avoiding romance and sharing the care of her four-year-old niece with Trudy’s mother, Claire. Claire still pines for Trudy’s father, a St. Lawrence Seaway construction worker who left her twenty years ago. Claire believes in true love. Trudy does not. She’s keeping herself to herself. But when Jules Tremblay, aspiring daredevil, walks into the Jubilee restaurant, Trudy’s a goner.
Loosely inspired by Ken “the Crazy Canuck” Carter’s attempt to jump the St. Lawrence River in a rocket car, and set in a 1970s hollowed-out town in eastern Ontario, Bad Ideas paints an indelible portrait of people on the forgotten fringes of life. Witty and wise, this is a novel that will stay with you a long time.
Review:
Three cheers for authors living in eastern Ontario!! Yay!!
Coming from a small, eastern Ontario village myself, the setting for this book was so FAMILIAR. I’ve been to Cornwall and to Brockville, and the made up town Preston Mills was just perfectly described. I recognized it while it was also fully fictional.
This book is slow paced, it’s picturesque, it’s dark and gritty and funny and real… but it’s also like reading a portrait. Life is slowly unravelling, with its ups and downs… and then the ending just catapults right into you, and there you are, gobsmacked. I wish there had been another chapter to wrap up all the loose ends, but I am also really glad it ended the way it did. Wow.
Good job, Missy Marston! I enjoyed this book.
JulieLiterary 