Their mutual friend Della, 10 years older than Eve, has been admitted for some unknown but apparently serious cause. It begins in February 1996, with Eve and a friend of hers named 'Seven' waiting in a Montreal hospital. For one thing, it covers a strictly defined social terrain, clearly familiar to the author, which Coupland has never ventured upon.

This is not to say the novel is derivative. Eyes, meanwhile, are variously compared to 'dark jawbreaker candies' and 'tiny snow-globes' and 'Nyquil pinholes.' The title itself of the novel is a metaphor, comparing the above-mentioned organ to a firecracker. At a moment of exhilaration, on the other hand, her heart sparkles 'like Pop Rocks candy.' 'Our hearts are accordions,' Eve says, describing a moment of stress. They are permanent in a way lovers never can be.'įinally, Eve often speaks in the kind of metaphor, far-fetched and based on contemporary culture and its artefacts, rather than on nature, virtually patented by Coupland. 'I am independent, I am going to give all to my friends and love them well. 'I've decided to fully commit myself to my friendships and not be one of those girls who can't survive without a partner,' Eve declares halfway through the novel. 'I was entirely too aware of my hands.'Įve also places a Coupland-esque emphasis on the importance of friends as a substitute for family and for lovers. The narrator of the novel, a 19-year-old named Eve, possesses much the same voice as many Coupland narrators, urgent with the tangled emotions of adolescence: 'I tried to look casual yet interested yet not too intense yet not too spacey,' Eve tells the reader at one point.

That Zoe Whittall, a former Montrealer and current Torontonian, uses a quotation from Douglas Coupland as an epigraph for her first novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, is apt for a number of reasons.

Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall