The Music Game
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2023 French-American Translation Prize for Fiction
Not far away from here is a lake. You have to pay for access to its shores, but I know where there’s a hole in the fence. The water will be icy, but it will still be in a liquid state. That’s what I will do today. I will go through the hole in the fence and I’ll dive into the icy water. And then I’ll go home.
Friends since grade school, Céline, Julie, and Sabrina come of age at the start of a new millennium, supporting each other and drifting apart as their lives pull them in different directions. But when their friend dies by suicide in the abandoned city lot where they once gathered, they must carry on in the world that left him behind—one they once dreamed they would change for the better. From the grind of Montreal service jobs, to isolated French Ontario countryside childhoods, to the tenuous cooperation of Bay Area punk squats, the three young women navigate everyday losses and fears against the backdrop of a tumultuous twenty-first century. An ode to friendship and the ties that bind us together, Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning The Music Game confronts the violence of the modern world and pays homage to those who work in the hope and faith that it can still be made a better place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clermont's charming debut follows three French-Canadian millennial women and their youthful, romantic coterie of leftist intellectuals. There is Sabrina, who dreams big but ends up at dead-end service jobs; Céline, the MA student whose bourgeois parents read Harraway, Derrida, and Malcolm X; and Julie, the girl with the broken family who aspires to be a tattoo artist. The three of them are idealistic and share a commitment to revolutionary politics, but as their stories unfold, they are repeatedly disillusioned by the world. For Sabrina, romances with older men lead to realizations of her young ignorance. Céline, while interviewing for an escort job, finds out Julie's stepfather gets sexual favors via the agency. Later, Sabrina falls in love with a punk rocker in California named Jess, who fights a losing battle over squatting rights for a community of outcasts in Oakland, but their relationship sours as Jess's activist spirit wanes. Though the angsty rants can grow repetitive, the author does a great job developing the characters, and their youthful sincerity feels genuine. This adds up to a heartfelt story of friendship.
