Nina, the Bandit Queen
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Nina Dolgoy leads her neighbours on a campaign to renovate the community pool, but the only way she can think to raise money is to rob a bank. Unfortunately, she isn’t very good at it.
In a part of town so beaten down that even prostitutes and drug dealers have written if off, Nina Dolgoy imagines that if the local pool wasn’t boarded up, her little daughters could use it to burn off their wayward energy and avoid falling into utter degradation. So the bitterly self-proclaimed "welfare queen" leads her neighbours on a fundraising, pool-fixing community-improvement campaign that proves the sad old adage that no good deed ever goes unpunished.
The only way Nina can think to raise money herself is by robbing a bank. Unfortunately, she isn’t very good at it. Coincidentally, her brother, Frank, gets out of jail and robs one.
The explosive events that are unleashed force Nina and the girls to flee for their lives, but their escape turns into a sublimely bizarre chase during which Nina somehow needs to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes.
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Concerned mother Nina Dolgoy, who lives on welfare in a rundown area of an unnamed Canadian city, aspires to small goals at the start of this comedic caper from Slinger (Punch Line). She stands up to the ice cream truck harassing local residents and works to reopen the condemned neighborhood school pool. When her financial straits lead her to contemplate bank robbery at the same time her convict brother takes part in one, she and her family become the focus of unwanted attention from friends, neighbors, criminal elements, and the authorities, who are convinced they must have the stolen funds. Slinger, a former Toronto Star columnist, mines the absurdities of life for humor, and has a number of nice turns of phrase and observations on the human condition, but he introduces so many disparate threads that even a relatively high body count can't resolve them all.
