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Titles > Novels > Bottle Rocket Hearts

Bottle Rocket Hearts
enlarge cover


Bottle Rocket Hearts
by Zoe Whittall

Novel

ISBN:
978-1-897151-06-8
5.125" x 7.625"
Trade Paper
$19.95
190 pages

BISAC Codes
FIC 018000 Fiction/Lesbian
FIC 019000 Fiction/Literary



Bottle Rocket Hearts
by Zoe Whittall

Zoe Whittall's interview with Jen McNeely on Proud FM
Part 1 (mp3, 1.5 mbs)
Part 2 (mp3, 2 mbs)

View the trailer for Bottle Rocket Hearts on YouTube here.

Zoe Whittall appeared on MTV Live on June 25th. Please go here to see the video and photos.

Bottle Rocket Hearts, the debut novel from Zoe Whittall, is a coming-of-age tale that goes down like a cherry popsicle. It’s a delicious, bright suburban delicacy melting in the inner-city sun.”
NOW Magazine


Welcome to Montreal in the months before the 1995 referendum. Riot Grrl gets bought out and mass marketed as the Spice Girls, and gays are gaining some legitimacy, but the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. It's been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; revolution seems possible, when you're 18, like Eve. Eve is pining to get out of her parent's house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back. She meets Della - mysterious, defiantly non-monogamous, an avid separatist and ten years older. Initially taken in by a mutual other-worldly sense of rapture, they hole up in Della's apartment trying to navigate spaces of jealousy when a biker bomb goes off down the street. Their explosive beginning makes way for an even more volatile relationship that spans the following two years. Answering an ad for a roommate at the gay bookstore, Eve meets a new family of friends — Seven, homo-core sweetheart who defies all clichés and Rachael, type-A activist and motivated poet. On the night of the 1995 referendum politics and romance come to a head and Eve's naiveté begins to fade. From naïve teenager to hot shot tough girl, Eve decides her own fate.

[download reader's guide]

About Zoe Whittall.

 

 

Reviews:

"Zoe Whittall might just possibly be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler ... Bottle Rocket Hearts is a major statement about lessening unhappiness by overcoming the small dishonesties that creep into everyday life."
The Globe and Mail


"Zoe Whittall's debut novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, is an achingly good read, bringing moments of joy to the reader along with heartache and sorrow ... Bottle Rocket Hearts is full of sarcasm, name-dropping and style punctuated with a queer, feminist twist ... This book comes alive for the reader and is a lovely coming-of-age story for women to reflect on and perhaps even relate to their daughters."
The Calgary Herald

"Bottle Rocket Hearts is assured, gripping and sincere ... [Whittall's] characters are richly detailed and wonderfully, quirkily vibrant ... The people in this book jump out of the pages and into your heart. Bottle Rocket Hearts is a delightful novel whose characters will stay in my thoughts for a long time to come."
Xtra!

"Bottle Rocket Hearts is about coming of age, identity, politics, the nature of love and who constitutes family. Anyone who is different in any way will relate ... Whittall's background as a poet shines in every paragraph. Her poetic voice hits hard and with beauty ... Bottle Rocket Hearts is a compelling story told by a writer skilled in her craft. It leaves me wanting more."
The Vancouver Sun