Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland

Girlfriend In A Coma has almost exactly the same character as its protagonists - human, blowing hot and cold, involving but somehow not that likable. That's not to say it's not a rather good book. But it's entirely possible to leave it not knowing whether to congratulate or slap the main characters. The book begins with two tragic incidents. It's 1979. Jared, a 16-year-old sex-mad footballer (in the Canadian sense), recounts dying of leukaemia. Karen loses her virginity on a snow-carpeted mountaintop, and within an hour collapses, falling into an inexplicable coma. The two events are connected only by Richard, Karen's boyfriend and Jared's oldest ...  Read the complete review

What do you do after the end of the world? What if you lived on, you and a few friends guided by the ghost of your earliest friend who had died years before in High School? Girlfriend in a Coma is a book that asks these kind of questions. Serious almost unimaginable questions. Its biggest question is this: What do you do if your girlfriend and the mother of your miraculous child goes into a coma for twenty years? This is the question Richard has been trying to answer or at least understand since Karen fell into a coma at a high school party the evening after they made love for the very first time. This is not Richard and his set of Vancouver friends ...  Read the complete review

Imagine if one day you woke up thinking that you had just been having a long deep sleep and instead you discovered that in fact you had been in a coma for the best part of twenty years, you had gone from being 17 to 35 overnight? Imagine that you stared around and all these people were starring back and you knew they were your friends and family, however, almost overnight they had aged twenty years? Imagine that there was a girl of 17 starring back at you and you had never seen her before in your life, but she looked like you and you got the feeling that she was more than just a stranger. You discover that in fact it is your daughter. Most ...  Read the complete review

Girlfriend In A Coma is one of those books that I had always wanted to read but never got round to then someone requested a swap on Readitswapit and this was one of the novels on offer. Not fancying anything else, I finally succumbed and decided to give it a go and what an experience I let myself in for! Reading on here, most of the reviews avaiolable are positive ones but my own thoughts were a little more hit 'n' miss. Whilst I didn't hate the book, there were sections of the early novel that I really enjoyed, the end chapters left me feeling very cold and more than just a tad confused exactly what point the author was trying to get across. The ...  Read the complete review

Some books just cannot deliver what they set out to. They set out their stall, express their abstract and then fall short. And I am afraid to say the Girlfriend in Coma falls well short. Perhaps I should come clean and say that this is the first work by Coupland that I have ever read and it came my way as a recommendation from a friend. So, if you like, I came cold to the book and its author. However, whilst I enjoyed this book and read it in two sittings, I am quite convinced that what Coupland was attempting was too ambitious for his talents. It begins very much like any teen saga: a group of young people who hang out in and outside of school are ...  Read the complete review