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__Hey Nostradamus Review__

“Hey Nostradamus!” is a novel written by [|Douglas Coupland] in 2003, and was published by Bloomsbury, New York and London. The story starts off in New Brunswick, Canada in 1988. The book is narrated through four different people. The first is Cheryl she walks us through the day she was gunned down and killed at a school shooting. Next we have Jason he was Cheryl’s boyfriend, he tells his side of the story eleven years later in 1999. The third person is Heather, who in 2002 is Jason’s girlfriend. The last is Reg, Jason’s father who tells his story in 2003. It’s difficult to say who the main character was, because all four of them played significant rolls. Coupland was able to show how one person’s death affected so many people’s lives. Even fifteen years after the school shooting, which brought horror and chaos to the town, lives are still falling to pieces over it.

The thing I admired most about this book was Coupland’s ability to give each character a clearly different role. Each character had his or her own life story, own opinions, and own ways of telling the reader how he or she has been heavily affected by the shooting. Cheryl is a senior who belongs to a Christian group called “//Youth// //Alive!”,// though since the summer she has been focusing more on her boyfriend Jason. After Cheryl’s death, the members of //“Youth Alive!”,// begin telling people that Jason killed her and was planning the shooting all along. This caused mass hysteria around town. Jason and his father, Reg never had a good relationship, the shooting only made it worse. Reg is a holy man, but it got to the point where he pushed his entire family away from him. As the story progresses we learn more about Reg and his reasoning for pushing his family away, and we also learn more about Heather.

I enjoyed the fact that Coupland didn’t just make one narrator it made the story a lot more interesting. Just seeing one side of a story can get boring at times, Coupland was able to spice things up a little and show us four different views on one tragic event. Coupland was also able to throw some humor into the primarily sad story.

One weakness I could point out, in my opinion, is the ending. The whole book was filled with ups and downs and I was expecting the ending to be a real eye opener, one that will really get me thinking. But instead, he left it open ended, we have to infer and decide for ourselves what really happened. But overall the suspense leading up to the ending was very good.

Douglas Coupland was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, and still lives there today. Other novels Coupland is well known for are //“Generation X”//, //“Miss Wyoming”//, //“All Families are Psychotic”//, and “//Eleanor Rigby”.// His writing style is smart and sophisticated; he manages to spin depressing topics into a “good read”, without butchering it. I enjoy Coupland and am very much looking forward to more by him.