THE BAD LUCK NICKEL

Hearts, friendships, and bags of Ritalin go flying in Leslie’s fast-paced YA coming-of-age novel.

Iconic rocker The Blade has banished his 16-year-old son Blair Matthews to live with his mother as a Trudeau High transfer student, hoping that a change of pace to the Canuck way of life will help the boy kick the cocaine habit he picked up in Los Angeles. Blair, beloved by everyone’s grandma as the star of a “Tim Horton’s Christmas commercial they play every year in French and English that makes everyone cry,” soon establishes himself as the leader of the high-school band the Bad Luck Nickel, joining starstruck classmates Marco, Randy, and Tank. Blair’s new girlfriend—Marco’s twin sister, Jules—is even more smitten, even if she has some reservations about Blair’s past. Things begin to fall apart one chaotic, booze-fueled night when Marco, Randy, and Tank find the father of Marco’s ex-girlfriend Bianca passed out from a heart attack in a snowbank. Meanwhile, Jules meets up with her best friend, Vicky, and snorts her first of many bumps of crushed-up Ritalin. The girls run afoul of local “shit disturbers” Yannis and Andre, who chase them to the secret spot they share with the Bad Luck Nickel boys. As Blair’s LA past closes in on him, the consequences of that night have a (literally) explosive impact on the Bad Luck Nickel’s rise to the top of the local scene. Leslie’s prose is fast-paced and strewn with appropriate intrusions of bravado-fueled expletives and Quebecois slang (“Va chier, you fuckin’ psycho”). The novel could use tightening up; the sheer volume of exclamation marks is overwhelming, and some of the more compelling subplots, like Randy’s grief over his older sister Nicole’s relatively recent death, get lost in the noise. But the narrative is effective at capturing the earnest angst and furious posturing of teenage life. The characters’ thoughts read like uncut diary entries: “I bet he knows that I’ll take the less and less because I am pathetic and stupid and blindly in love with him.” Tabarnak, c’est difficile to be a teen.

Adolescents going through similar ups and downs will find plenty here to love.