January 1, 2025
Currie (winner of the NYPL Young Lions, Metcalf, Alex, and Pushcart awards), who is also a screenwriter for Apple TV+'s Extrapolations, turns to literary crime fiction with this funny series opener based on the lives of French Canadians in New England and starring an all-women criminal gang in their 60s. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from March 15, 2025
A matriarch struggles to keep her family alive and well in a drug-sick patch of Maine. Babs Dionne, the hero of Currie's bracing fourth novel, has a chip on her shoulder, and who can blame her? In 1968, when she was 14, she was raped by a policeman in her hometown; after she killed him, she was sent to a convent that helped her evade punishment, but that also separated her from her Francophone upbringing. (Her town, Waterville, has a neighborhood named Little Canada in tribute to its Quebecois roots.) Fast-forward to 2016, and Babs' role as the town's doyenne--achieved by running the community's opioid trade, passively supported by police and religious leaders looking the other way--is starting to collapse. One of her daughters, Sis, is a meth addict who's gone missing; her grandson needs rescuing from an abusive father; another daughter, Lori, is an Afghan war vet who's shuffling between heroin and oxy. (We first meet her overdosing in a bar bathroom before a dose of Narcan saves her.) Meanwhile, a hitman for a rival dealer has arrived in town, ready to kill anybody standing in his way. The setting is almost relentlessly tragic and violent--oh, and there's a meth-dealing serial killer on the loose--but Currie's focus on Babs' intense care for her family gives the novel an almost cozy temperament. "If you loved like Babs does, it would break you," a friend says, and Babs exemplifies a family that loves deeply if not always wisely. The plot turns on Babs' efforts during a summer week to resolve a death in the family, protect who's left, and start a school that'll support the community's dying Francophone culture. Nobody will confuse this for an Anne Tyler novel, but Currie has created a charming community to root for, even if, as the title suggests, all victories here are pyrrhic. A hyperviolent family saga with surprising amounts of humor and empathy.
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