The Sopranos - Softcover

If there's any justice, Alan Warner's third novel, The Sopranos, will lead to a sudden fad for artificially shortened kilt skirts, bright shoelaces, and flaming sambuca shots. As it is, we might have to settle for the sopranos themselves, six memorably vile-mouthed Catholic schoolgirls sent from their drab port town to "the big, big city" for the Scottish national choir finals. There Warner follows them as they shop, smoke, eat Big Macs, consume staggering amounts of alcohol, and pay no attention whatsoever to the competition. Winning, after all, would defeat their central goal: returning in time for the slow dances at the Mantrap and the promise of submariners on leave. In the end, it turns out that the nuclear submarine has stopped in their harbor only to unload a dead sailor, and the girls must console themselves with alcohol, sex, a veritable inferno of fireworks, and even one heartbreakingly courageous kiss.

By turns bawdy and tender, funny and sad, The Sopranos faces adolescence head-on, without sentiment or false hope. Youth, for these girls, is precious precisely because they have so little to look forward to. When their friend becomes pregnant, she's already "devoured the few opportunities for the wee bit sparkle that was ever going to come her way." When the nuns' parrot--who likes to spout Spanish obscenities during Mass--escapes from the school, his bright colors are "like a happiness that wasn't allowed below such skies, against these curt roof angles of slate and granite." Theirs is a grim, circumscribed world, but the sopranos shine like tropical birds against the background of gray. --Mary Park

Alan Warner, who was born in Scotland, is the author of the novels Morvern Callar, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and These Demented Lands, which won an Encore Award. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.