I have read Ali Bryan’s Roost and The Figgs and loved them both. This summer, she published two more books, and I decided to round it off by also reading her YA novel. Presented in the order in which I read them.

Coq (Freehand Books)

Several years ago, I wrote about Roost, a book by Ali Bryan set in Halifax about the messy life of a single mom attempting to raise her children while working a full-time job, sharing her kids with her ex, dealing with her squabbling sibling and his family, while coping with her mother’s recent death and her father’s struggle with independent living. It was funny and relatable and so much fun. And now they’re back!

It’s ten years later and Claudia is still single but getting tired of being alone all the time. Her son Wes is now 16-years-old, and her daughter Joan is 13 – posing a whole new range of parenting conundrums.

The book begins with the wedding of her elderly father to a woman named Mona who has five grown sons, all of whom are in the military. Claudia is in a rush to get to the wedding and can only control so much now that her kids are older. Joan ends up wearing a tube top to the wedding , and upon complaining about it, Joan accuses Claudia of slut-shaming. Claudia’s brother Dan is weepy over the recent separation with his wife, and is sent to help Wes as a distraction. They both end up stoned after (apparently) innocently consuming watermelon gummies Wes found in the glove compartment of the car. And in the last row of pews, Claudia’s ex, Glen, is looking “dapper and tanned.”

Ten years after the death of Claudia’s mother, the family plans a memorial trip to Paris, a place she had always wanted to visit. Ten days in Paris with her two kids, Dan and his three kids, her father and Mona, and an ex-husband who wants to get back together… What could go wrong?

Teasers: handcuffs, hickeys, mimes, police officers, a protest, stitches, a climate scientist, an old lover, immodium, secret meet-ups, and a lot of wine.

What happens next will never be spoken of again.

A few of my favourite lines/passages…

She hands me a special lip gloss remover that smells like turpentine. I’m not convinced it won’t dissolve my teeth or remove my lips entirely, which might not be a bad thing. I could get my mouth replacement surgery. I’m sure I can find a spare mouth in a bin of Mr. Potato Heads in the basement.

Nothing says romance like dancing to “Sexual Healing” at your elderly father’s wedding while your kids spy at you from the back door.

She fixes her hair, checks her makeup in the screen of her iPhone and then gives me directions on how to take the shot. Stand there. Move left. Why are you so close? Hold it lower. I take seven hundred pictures and Joan lets me and half of Paris know that I deserve to decay slowly in hell for my poor photography skills and also my nose, which she wishes I hadn’t passed down.

I can’t remember my pin. Why can’t I remember my pin? I can remember my childhood phone number, my student ID, the code to a lock I owned ten years ago, the number of crackers in a sleeve of saltines, the entire lyrics of Snow’s “Informer.” Not my pin.

I should have stayed up last night to do some research. Instead, I googled face serums, Sylvester Stallone, the wall of I Love Yous, polygamy, and a what-would-I-look-like-with-bangs simulator. The answer is Jim Carrey.

The Hill (Dottir Press)

This was such a completely different reading experience from her other books that I was impressed by that fact alone. It’s YA, which I don’t usually read, but it’s a dystopian story with a premise that intrigued me. Ali Bryan was also publishing two new adult contemporary books (Coq and The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships) that I planned to read, and it felt incomplete to leave this one out.

Wren is the 15-year-old leader of a group of girls who live on The Hill (which is really a reclaimed garbage heap) alone, but whose existence is regulated by The Colony. The Hill has been in existence for 67 years, and every year all the girls over the age of 15 must depart to the Colony. The Colony is also made up solely of women as a rebellion to the male-dominated society they believe to have ruined the earth. Babies are sent to The Hill to be raised by the girls there and trained to follow the rules in The Manual – rules that help them gain skills and keep safe, but avoid telling the truth of what’s happening in the rest of the world. The girls are tough and capable, but at the same time innocent of many things they’ve never experienced. So when boys show up from the Mainland, all Wren and the others know is that they are bad news and need to be exterminated. But Wren soon finds out that things aren’t quite so simple.

Climate crisis, political unrest, friendship, loyalty, gender, coming-of-age all play a part in this story. A couple of reviews on Goodreads suggests that there’s too much going on, but I didn’t think so – I found it fast-paced and easy to follow. And the ending is left wide open for a sequel. Which I would totally read.

For a while, we walk single-file, periodically leaning over to watch the ocean below, nipping and charging at the cliffs in a white fury. At times, I think I spot the slick head of a gray seal, the shadow of a whale that never breaches, the outline of a boat, the 105th floor of a lost skyscraper. Structures we’ve read about but exist only in our imagination.

I want to rip it all to shreds. Where is the stuff about the Mainland? Where is the section on what to do after an attack? Where is the truth?

The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships (Henry Holt & Co.)

This is a good example of a funny book that is also depressing (or a depressing book that is also funny?), which–for me–is becoming a winning combination. (Right before reading this book I had read Lump by Nathan Whitlock which I would also put in this tragicomic category.) Part way through, while I was enjoying it so much, I realized that these poor characters were miserable. None of them had a life they were happy with.

Crow Valley takes place all on one day – the day of the Karaoke Championships – which is apparently a big thing in Crow Valley. However, there’s a grey cloud hanging over this year’s competition – Crow Valley’s own karaoke champion–Dale Jepson–died in a terrible fire the year before. The ripple effects of Dale’s life and death are widespread.

Below, people were getting rowdy, The hall was full of heartburn and heartache both. Things were slowly becoming unhinged and undone. Zippers, buttons, straps, marriages, thoughts, feelings, fists.

Without Dale, Roxanne is bereft. A year after the fires, she’s still grieving hard… she carries “Dale” around in his thermos and talks to it/him. On this particular night, she leaves it behind as she hurries out to perform her duty as one of this year’s karaoke judges.

Even if she wanted to start living, she didn’t know how. Not living is what she knew. Standing knee-deep in grief is how she functioned. She believed Dale would come back with the same fervor a Christian believed in the second coming of Christ.

Val, who works as a guard at the Crow Valley Correctional–and worked with Dale before the accident–is filled with thoughts of alcohol and longs for just one drink. This one-day-at-a-time thing is so hard. Her marriage to Brett has also been hard, especially since his affair. She wonders if she will ever be able to move past it.

That was the thing about marriage; it was good until all of a sudden it wasn’t. Like meat in a refrigerator. Prime, pink, and reliable one day, gray and questionable the next. You ate it anyway, ignoring that it might be off, ignoring the pain in your gut, in your heart.

Brett desperately wants to win back Val’s trust. He also desperately wants to win this year’s karaoke competition. For Dale. Or, maybe, to be Dale.

Logging was exhausting. Averageness was exhausting. Pine needles were regularly lodged in his socks, his shoulders ached, and there was always a game on TV, perpetually in overtime, in extra innings, on a fourth down. He’d never match Val’s energy, but he admired it from the comfort of the couch, the way she signed the permission slips and bleached the sinks. The couch, olive-coloured, overstuffed, microsuede, so comfortable that he lost his marriage in its seams.

Molly is also desperate to win the competition. Performing is the only thing she has that’s her own – the rest of the time she’s a wife and mother to four rambunctious boys. She has a caring husband, though, who wonders about that night of the fire and what Molly was really doing there.

Molly stumbled backward, dropping the mic, her moment over. She was over, like a canceled celebrity. The truth was that she was over long ago. Motherhood had given her four boys and they were lovely and smart and horrible and in exchange it had taken her. Motherhood was a con man. Motherhood was a thief.

Then there’s Marcel, the young man who escapes from prison that night. He knew Dale, too, but has a very different opinion of him from everyone else. But he really likes Norman, and the female guard is a regular part of his fantasies. His getaway doesn’t go quite as smoothly as he might have hoped. Things get stolen, bodies get licked, and dogs get de-quilled.

Marcel was an excellent listener. He could differentiate between the whooshing sound of his father removing his belt and the grittier whooshing sound of his father dry-shaving his face. He knew the different prison guards’ footsteps and gaits, the distinct jingle of their keys… When he heard nothing, Marcel slipped out of the bus, yanking the door taut behind him. ‘Don’t punch yourself in the face. Work hard. Forgive.’

The story is told through the alternating narrations of these five characters throughout the chaotic night of the karaoke competition. A lot is at stake: they want to be seen, they want to be loved, and they want to be free.

Kabir turned and descended the stairs on a mission, as if he knew Crow Valley would always be on fire. That at any given time somewhere, something, someone would be burning.

Do any of these tempt you? Are you a fan of funny depressing books (Crow Valley), or would you rather just funny (Coq)?