by Ali Bryan
FREEHAND BOOKS
2023/$23.95/288 pp.
It’s been 10 years since Claudia’s mother died; now Ali Bryan is back with her good-natured protagonist and a sequel to the well-received novel Roost.
We begin with the swift marriage of Claudia’s father to a woman entirely unlike Claudia’s deceased mother. We also meet a bunch of teenagers with a wide variety of teenager problems, a brother recently divorced and almost always sobbing, and an ex-husband desperate to be back in the picture. It’s a bit of a crowd. This is Coq. It’s quick-paced and funny, the type of book that’s easy to recommend because it has something for everyone—star-crossed lovers (of both the adult and teenage variety), an international destination and lots of familial tragicomedy. Bryan relies a little too much on tropes, but the family—a large, earnest, emotional gang—is lovable.
The novel is fast-paced, although at times it falls into the rut of gag-to-gag storytelling. Characters make surprise visits with armfuls of flowers, two ex-spouses are handcuffed together by a mime, several people fall off bikes, love messages are sent mistakenly through LinkedIn, and Claudia’s father’s new wife loots a handful of berets in the midst of a climate protest. There are new lovers, old lovers and a secret French lover. The whole trip moves quickly for the travellers and the reader alike.
It makes sense that Claudia’s life gets a second book. She is a confident, independent woman and an anxious, confused wreck. She loves her children one moment and is disgusted and annoyed by them the next. She is hungry to make meaningful moments and she just wants to go home. This is all very relatable.
Most of the book centres on ways that Claudia—and by extension her family—struggles to know how to honour the memory of her mother. But this emotional centrepiece can get lost among the physical humour and romantic comedy situations. Making the main character a high-powered businesswoman (she’s VP of a grocery business) and also a clumsy, lonely woman in search of love comes across as a little too easy and rides the line too close to cliché. I found myself rooting for Claudia, though I wasn’t really sure if I wanted her to close a deal or elope with the mysterious oceanographer or get back together with her ex-husband or just go home.
Ultimately Coq will make you laugh quietly and shake your head. It flirts with cliché but is easy to read and the characters are unique and believable enough to hold the story together. The writing is quick and fresh and one charming sentence sums it all up. Claudia, in a breath between catastrophes, reflects: “My mother is gone and this is how I honour her. With a midlife crisis, subtitled in French.”
Megan Clark is a writer and librarian from Lethbridge.
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