Hey Nostradamus!

By: Douglas Coupland

Narrated by: Jenna Lamia, David LeDoux, Jillian Crane, John Randolph Jones

Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles what becomes her last will and testament on a school binder shortly before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high school cafeteria. Overrun with paranoia, teenage angst, and religious zeal in the massacre's wake, this sleepy suburban neighborhood declares its saints, brands its demons, and moves on.

But, for a handful of people still reeling from that horrific day, life remains permanently derailed. Four dramatically different characters tell their stories: Cheryl, who calmly narrates her own death; Jason, the boy no one knew was her husband, still marooned ten years later by his loss; Heather, the woman trying to love the shattered Jason; and Jason's father, Reg, whose rigid religiosity has separated him from nearly everyone he loves.

©2003 Douglas Coupland (P)2003 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

"[Coupland]'s best novel to date." (LA Weekly)
"It's an extraordinarily well-written novel with characters you know you shouldn't be liking but do. So real." (Whoopi Goldberg)

sheer brilliance

Great novel, wonderfully written- a triumph. Narrators also fantastic. Coupland captures sadness, depression, tragedy and comedy in a gem of a book.

Wow! So well written, so thought provoking

I was really wowed by this book, the first Coupland book I've ever "read". It's nominally about the tragedy and after-effects of a school massacre much like the Columbine shootings in 1999, but in reality it's about hope, dreams, religion, despair, faith, secrets, and guilt. It's in four first-person accounts by a victim, a survivor, a girlfriend of a survivor, and a parent of a survivor.

As one might expect with those subjects, nothing is neatly resolved by the end of the book.....but that's part of its strength. Questions of faith, love, hope, guilt, and dreams will always be with every one of us, and all we can do is keep puzzling things through. The journey is as important as the destination.

Hey Coupland, ya did it again!

As usual, Coupland has tapped into the "gen-x" mind and produced a rugged, honest and engaging tale of living in this crazy world. The story just works and it is told with unusual honesty and frankness. The narrators actually do justice to the telling of the tale, and this is something I don't often say. Some narrators take away from an otherwise good story but these folks enhance an already terrific listen. Two thumbs way up!

Great book, perfectly read.

Douglas Coupland?s Hey Nostradamus! was on my reading list before I discovered Audible.com The book is worth reading in any format. What I want to address here is the awesome quality of this reading?an important dimension of the experience for regular listeners. This production gets 5 out of 5 stars! The separate readers for the book?s four parts bring the novel to life with characterizations that are spot on and that will echo through your memory long after you finish the book. Superbly done!

While the book has ample literary merit to recommend it, one particularly remarkable achievement stands out in the novel?s first part. While adolescent hormones take a back seat here (or at least yield equal billing) to meditations on love, death, God, religion, and the somewhat modern phenomenon of sudden, incomprehensible violence, what makes Coupland?s rendering of the teen sex drive so remarkable is that it loses none of its accuracy or all-absorbing urgency when he wraps it in the societal legitimacy of marriage. I found that a startlingly refreshing departure from the normal authorial choices in that regard.

Things need a little explaining...

This book starts out really weak, almost annoying. Stick with it, it does get a little more interesting. It's depressing though, and will leave you asking questions; mostly about instances in the story I felt the author should have expounded upon.

The four separate readers definitely does this book a favor and really identifies the characters well for you.

A lot of fun, a bit uneven

The topic -- playing off the concept of school shootings, the most disturbing of which was, naturally, Columbine -- was what caught me, but kind of in the way one gets their attention grabbed by a car wreck; you know maybe you shouldn't be looking, but you can't help but look.

This book's topic is a bit like that, but fortunately the novel inside is pretty darn good. For me, the most likeable character was Cheryl Anway, the easiest to like, naturally. From there, the novel is a bit uneven; the sections dedicated to each of the four leads are unequal in length, which is troublesome in that some characters feel more two-dimensional as a result, most notably in the last part.

I did appreciate the way the whole truth of circumstances involved only become clear after reading the whole book; it's a time-honored trick but nicely pulled off here. Well done, overall.

Great story, but too short, where is the sequel?

Would you listen to Hey Nostradamus! again? Why?

Yes, it kept me interested, the ending was not what I expected

What did you like best about this story?

4 different views....each unique!

What about the narrators’s performance did you like?

wonderful

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

yes, yes and yes

Any additional comments?

Is there going to be a sequel

Excellent, annoying, scary

As one other reviewer pointed out, you really have to struggle through the first part of this, but it is worth it -- it does get better. All the sections are narrated in the first person and Cheryl, the girl telling her story in the first section, is so unbearably shallow and uneducated that it's very easy to think that this is a book written by such a person. It's actually made worse by the fact that Coupland's characterization of Cheryl is so brilliant -- she is so awesomely dumb that one's first instinct is to want to put the book down.

Even when it does get better this is not a book to read if you're feeling down. It provides a seriously scary view of America -- both of the current generation in general and of a certain breed of born-again Christians in particular. A generation that cannot imagine that anything in the world exists outside of shopping malls, or that religion could possibly be anything more than the simpering, suger-coated malevolence of TV evangelists.

Nor is there any ray of light anywhere: Coupland never steps outside of the frightening, comic-strip simplicity of his characters' world. It is a nihilistic vision of a scorched human desert, in which the heritage of thousands of years of history, culture and spirituality simply do not exist. It is brilliantly done but terribly depressing. And at the end one cannot help wondering: Is Coupland describing this as a conscious observer, who understands what he sees and is just as alarmed about it as his readers? Or is he an unconscious participant, part of the comic-book generation without past or future?

Half way there...

I may have to listen to this one again. I guess I thought this book was more about the events of a school shooting, rather than the lives of those affected years after it occurred. I feel like I really have no idea what happened with the 4 characters/narrators. The first and third narrators really held my interest (they were both females). I'm hoping I'm more engaged with the second and fourth narrators (both guys) during the 2nd listen, since I have a better understanding now who they are. I would probably give this a 3.5 rating because even though I listened the entire way through, I could have stopped at any point beyond narrator #1 and been fine with it. I didn't score it lower because the opening was outstanding (narrator #1), and the story with narrator #3 kept me wanting to hear more. It just seems like there should have been a little more to the story...

I'm not sure if I would recommend this book....I'll update after I listen to it again.

memorable and moving

I listened to this book a long time ago, but still hold it up as one of the most gripping I've heard. This is due, not only to Coupland's quirky and compelling writing, but to the astonishing performances by each of the readers. The last "movement" of the novel moved me to tears.