Hey Nostradamus! - Douglas Coupland

Advantages: Excellent characterisations, funny moments.
Disadvantages: Weak plot structure.

...Coupland's latest novel. Hey Nostramus! is a novel of these four voices in turn. Firstly, we hear from Cheryl, after she has died, in some kind of holding place. Cheryl was a young Christian evangelist and a pretty, unassuming girl, full of adolescent love for her boyfriend Jason, but also for life and the beauty of the world. Her voice is almost Keatsian: "I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I wondered ...
...well feel tempted to allow Hey Nostradamus! to pass you by. You might feel that it's likely to be superficial, style-over-substance stuff, the literary equivalent of that fashion faux pas, the puffball skirt, as it were. Well, y'know… not so. Hey Nostradamus! is actually a tremendously engaging book. It's dark, yes. It's arch and on occasion it's darkly funny, yes. It's full of the kind of comment on the banal nature of consumerism that is the hallmark ... Read review

Advantages: Beautifully written, engaging characters, thought-provoking
Disadvantages: Makes you think - and some people don't like to be made to think

Hey Nostradamus is one of those books that stays with you, that haunts you, that you can't get out of your head. The themes, the issues, the characters and the events replay constantly, and can jump out at you unexpectedly for a long time after the book has been replaced on the shelves. It deals with many of the deepest concerns of early twenty-first century humanity - the capacity for violence and for love, the power of the media, trust, faith, ...
...2001 literary landscape, though the terrible events of that day are never mentioned, the book does not offer answers, but explores the questions in a profound and moving way. Told by four people over the course of fifteen years, the book's central focus is a high-school shooting which has profound effects on the lives of the people involved and the people who know them. Everything else in the narrative is seen in the light of the moment when three ... Read review

Advantages: Good ideas, interesting to read
Disadvantages: Too many loose ends, too similar to other Coupland stuff

Douglas Coupland is a hip writer. If you want to be hip, you have to read Douglas Coupland. At least, that's what I was told, and who am I to ignore all those nice people who say such nice things about Mr Coupland on the backs of his books? I know that hip isn't a word we use these days, but hip is the kind of word that you might find this author using, albeit in a modern, ironic way. I'm not particularly fashionable, but I do enjoy some of Douglas ...
...fifth of his books I have read and I think I was equally split in my opinion of his writing until now. I’m caught between loving two and, well, not exactly hating two, but being underwhelmed by them. This was recommended to me by someone who was aware of my feelings about Coupland, so I had high hopes for the book. 'Hey Nostradamus!' is a tale told by four people, all of whom share some sort of connection. Cheryl Anway is forever seventeen, murdered ... Read review

Advantages: It makes you think
Disadvantages: It makes you think!

...style, with all the loose ends tied up - he leaves them flapping in the wind. I finished this book wanting desperately to know what happens yet. In the absence of that, I went out and bought the whole back catalogue of his work – and then re-read Hey Nostradamus! ... Read review