Cormorant Books, 2007

Read by Kelly Ward

Eve is nineteen, but has yet to experience much outside her sheltered family home in Dorval. She knows she’s different from the typical suburban kids she’s surrounded with; she doesn’t see herself reflected in the straight, white edges of cookie-cutter homes and shopping malls. So when she makes the move to downtown Montreal, to a “homo haven” with roommates Rachel (a poet and grad student) and Seven (a deliciously gorgeous drug dealer), it is as if her world has cracked open to reveal a new plane of existence simmering just beneath the surface of the one she previously inhabited. She negotiates her way through this new world, forced to confront everything from AIDS to homophobia to political turmoil embodied in the 1995 referendum. She also wades through her first real love affair, an on-again, off-again relationship with an older woman named Della. 

The core of the story lies in the jealousy, obsession and raw sexuality that sparks and fizzles between Della and Eve. The writer dances the reader just close enough to Della to feel uneasy about her. Eve’s naivety, and Della’s infidelity and instability force the many layers of the story to pivot around this very well-drawn relationship.

For the most part, Whittall brilliantly weaves into the action of the story issues that may stand blatantly at centre stage in the hands of a lesser writer. However, there is more than one exception to this, and moments in which the page seems to devolve momentarily into soap-box can become distracting. Her treatment of the characters’ reactions to a tragic death is one such moment. An entire chapter is dedicated to the long description of a play staged by Seven in reaction to the incident, telling rather than allowing the characters’ feelings to manifest organically through their actions.   

In its best moments—in the glimpses of Eve’s dairy-jottings and her obsessive confusion—Bottle Rocket Hearts brings to mind Jeanette Winterson circa Written on the Body with an adolescent, punk-tinged flare. This is a believable, flesh and blood narrator whose flaws make her all the more enduring. Bottle Rocket Hearts is a Polaroid snap-shot of a time and place: a city searching for its identity and mediating its loyalties, a girl looking to do the same.