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 Bottle Rocket Hearts, by Zoe Whittall.
This is my third time reading Bottle Rocket Hearts, and each time I re-open the pages I’m struck by the way the characters come to life for me. Rather than summarize the plot myself, I’ll pull a few excerpts from the excellent Quill and Quire review:
Bottle Rocket Hearts, the first novel from former Montrealer Zoe Whittall, who now lives in Toronto, follows the life of Eve, a gay (though occasionally sexually omnivorous) young woman on the cusp of adulthood, as she negotiates life and love in Montreal in the mid-1990s.
The novel opens with Eve sitting in the waiting room at Montreal General
Hospital, waiting for word about her girlfriend, Della, who may be
having a mental breakdown. …Eve is angst-ridden and confused, struggling
to define herself within the anglo-franco, straight-queer dichotomies
of her city…
Bottle Rocket Hearts is the coming-of-age story of Eve. It mainly
revolves around her relationship with her first girlfriend, Della. Della and Eve have an incredibly tumultuous relationship - they can’t
decide if they want monogamy or not; they can’t figure out how to
communicate; they repeatedly shatter each others’ trust. Eve is just
beginning to make her way into the queer community; she falls in love
with the assistant in her college art class, bakes vegan cookies with
her new girlfriend, moves away from her suburban parents after replying
to a roommate-wanted ad for a “Homo Haven”. But she is acutely aware of
her different-ness from those around her. She’s the only one who
doesn’t have scars from the 1990 Sex Garage riots. She hasn’t lost half her
friends to AIDS. Eve enthusiastically signs up for women’s studies
courses and takes charge of the megaphone at protests and actions,
trying to earn credentials among her new friends.
Eve’s search for her individual identity, as well as a search for
identity in terms of her relationships with the people she has begun to
surround herself with, is paralleled by the political crisis of the 1995 referendum. Eve’s Quebec
is home-and-not-home; her province is searching for an identity within
Canada as it seeks to assert its francophone-ness. But Eve speaks
English; her poor French embarrasses her. For Eve, growing up in an
anglophone suburb, “it seems no one in the west end is worried about
bombs, only the impending fear that if Quebec separates, we’ll be forced
to move to Cornwall or Kingston”. The new life she builds for herself,
the life of late-night kitchen dance parties, hash brownies and gay
bars, is three bus rides away from the isolated English home she grew up
in. She puts more thought into the glittered silver dress she bikes to
the polls in than the X she marks on her ballot. She’s ashamed to
admit her political apathy.
In a moment of heartbreaking truth, Eve’s search for security through
pursuit of a strong identity is shattered. Eve has held up her roommate
Rachel as an ideal of well-grounded self assurance. An activist,
author, graduate student, and respected leader in the queer community,
Rachel is beaten to death by neo-nazi skinheads while walking home from
the bar. Eve’s world falls apart as she realizes that establishing a
strong identity for herself won’t ultimately provide safety. Rachel’s
death is like a push over the edge, forcing Eve to decide how strongly
she cares about standing up for who she really is.
Bottle Rocket Hearts is, for me, a reminder to stand up for what I
believe in and to be fully aware of the consequences. Many of us can
identify with Eve’s struggle to define her opinions on a variety of
social and political issues. Her eventual arrival at a set of values
that she can stand by leaves her confident to begin making decisions
about her identity based on who she wants to be rather than what she
perceives others want from her. Rather than presenting us with a
cut-and-dried conclusion, however, Zoe Whitall draws this story to a
close with an accurate reflection of reality: that making decisions
about what we believe is difficult, but making them is better than
leaving them unmade.
Review by Jennifer Hoyer
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Thursday, 17 May 2012 
