Reviews

Shoot!

Stephen Osborne

Biggest Disappointment: Shoot! by George Bowering (Key Porter). I was looking forward to this one because it has Kamloops in it, and the McLean Gang to boot. Kamloops is a town that doesn't often make it into literature, and the McLean Gang, notorious a hundred years ago in Thompson River country, has been waiting for a novel all that time. But Shoot! ain't it; in this one we hear a Bowering sunk so far into smart-ass narrative that he can do no more than string together an endless array of patronizing remarks, cheap shots and condescending asides—to succeed only in insulting his subjects and offending his readers. An utterly forgettable work.

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Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


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