by Amanda Boyden
McClelland & Stewart, 301 pages.

Review by Heather Christie

So get this. You’re born, you go to school, grow up, whatever, and you meet your ruggedly handsome true love in a creative writing program in Indiana. The two of you get married and spend your time bopping between—of all places– New Orleans and Moose Factory, Ontario, writing furiously while also teaching. Over the years and after much blood, sweat, tears, etc. you both become rising literary superstars and live happily ever after.

Although the last part is still to be determined for Amanda Boyden, the rest of the story pretty much sums up her seemingly storybookishly chaotic life. Although she’s wildly in love with and married to Joseph Boyden, who recently won The Giller Prize, one of Canada’s most prestigious awards, Amanda is no slouch of her own, and her most recent novel Babylon Rolling is the pudding where the proof of her talent is.

Babylon Rolling provides a depiction of a pre-Katrina New Orleans. It details most strikingly the divergent lives of one street of a very diverse group of people and demonstrates how catastrophe can give birth to socio-cultural harmony.

Each chapter is written in the voice of a different one of the five main characters, vividly providing insight into how they process and evaluate their environment, tackling extramarital hotel love affairs, thug-and-drug culture, stay-at-home-functional-alcoholic-parenting, and teenaged pregnancy, to name but a few of the issues wrapped up in the novel. More than anything, Babylon Rolling deals with how humans of all walks of life experience love and loss.

Babylon Rolling is a beautiful, if fast, read. Not exactly what you would call traditional beach fare, but hey, isn’t it time we up the ante on what can be considered appropriate for the beach? It paints a rather heart-braking picture of human interaction.