Living legends

Roxy and Coco
by Terese Svoboda

Morgantown: U West Virginia Press, 2024
$29.99 / 9781959000068

Reviewed by Jessica Poon

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In Terese Svoboda’s latest novel, Roxy and Coco are sisters with the noble desire to stop child abuse. They’re also harpies, described by Ovid as half woman, half vulture. Their noses are larger than average and their wings are tucked underneath jackets with the occasional feather escaping, but otherwise, they credibly pass for human. The sisters’ mother, now deceased, is described as having been in a “reverse Leda situation.” Roxy is blonde and, true to convention, more bubbly and less homicidal than Coco, who has dark hair, a hair colour foil visual shorthand that shows no indication of extinction (if the music video for “I’m Not Pretty” by Megan Mulroney is anything to go by). 

Roxy and Coco’s colleague, Tim, is hired by a wealthy avian egg collector named Reagan, to investigate—a euphemism—Roxy’s purported mythical qualities. With the fatality of a romantic comedy, Tim ends up genuinely falling for Roxy; even so, this semblance of true romance doesn’t prevent him from behaving abominably. Although Coco suspects Tim is unworthy of her sister, the reader knows this to be the case, which makes the comparative ignorance of Coco and Roxy immensely frustrating. If this discrepancy in knowledge is intentionally frustrating, it’s a resounding success. 

Meanwhile, there’s Robinson, formerly an employee of the Kardashians, who has inadvisably switched espionage gigs and is now spying on Coco, who isn’t nearly as dynamic as any Kardashian. The relative drudgery means that Robinson is often distracted by whatever his dog is doing—the dog is never referred to by name, but we hear about the dog often—as well as Robinson’s favouring of anchovy pizza. 

There’s also Stewie, reliably filling in the requisite role as a person of colour uttering person of colour insights. He also happens to be a skilled driver, genuinely cares about the welfare of children, and “does the whole cock-of-the-walk thing that only husky Black guys can pull off.”

And there’s Coco’s favourite troubled child, Chris, who is bipolar and owns a skateboard, who would probably benefit from seeing a shrink, which is the term Coco uses. I could be wrong, but I suspect it’s not the term most social workers would say to their juvenile clients. Of course, most social workers aren’t badass harpies with vigilante murders in their past. 

Some of the best conversations in this novel by prolific Victoria-based writer Svoboda (Dog on Fire) occur between Chris and Coco. At one point, she says to him, “Nobody fails at being a kid.” There’s a genuinely funny moment when Coco thinks: “ … I made a kid happy—and I didn’t have to kill anybody to do it!”

For the most part, Roxy and Coco is written breezily, with short sentences, many sentence fragments, and abundant dialogue without quotation marks. The novel’s ambitions in addressing weighty topics—child abuse, heterosexual dynamics, mental illness, speciesism—in short chapters sympathetic to nearly nonexistent attention spans is admirable, though luxuriating just a little more introspectively in a few places would have been welcome. Its fast pace is the novelistic equivalent of a heist film. In a few instances, there are three-word repetitions, which can zhuzh up an otherwise quotidian sentence, but can also be distractingly gimmicky: “A small tapir herd on the other side of the zoo fence is eating eating eating like the pigs they resemble”; “We’re quiet quiet quiet while he looks around”; “Messiaen birdsong of trumpets and rumbling timpani, Wings of Desire, the wingless German guys in ugly overcoats, putti conniving against all the adults in a painting or else pulling them apart, bickering bickering bickering, ….”

The novel is best when Coco makes her rightfully scathing observations that wouldn’t be out of place from environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen or a monologue from Dexter:

Fear is the primary emotion humans engender in other creatures, not love. I scorn humans for their naivete about the wisdom of other species, their begrudging whales a language and crows the ability to count. Mine is the response of a creature who’s hard to kill and who’s had centuries of experience with behaviours both human and animal.
I eat the fly.

If you spend an inordinate amount of time watching movies and reading books, there will come a cosmic instance when you consume incredibly different works of art with little in common, but that nevertheless reference the same art, which is often, but not always, a cultural touchstone. I experienced this pleasingly inadvertent synchronicity with “Hope is a thing with feathers,” one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous lines of poetry. Dickinson’s famous aphorism shows up in What Comes Around, a film whose watchability is largely owed to Kyle Galler’s phenomenal talent for maximizing audience empathy out of the most troubled, desperately-needs-a-hug-and-different-childhood characters—and it shows up in the end of Roxy and Coco, from Stewie. It’s true—Roxy and Coco has, in spades, both hope and feathers.

Originally from East Vancouver, Jessica Poon is a writer, former line cook, and pianist of dubious merit who recently returned to BC after completing a MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has recently reviewed books by Wendy H. Wong, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Sarah Leipciger, Katrina Kwan, Shelley Wood, Richard Kelly Kemick, Elisabeth Eaves, Rajinderpal S. Pal, Keziah Weir, Amber Cowie, Robyn Harding, Roz Nay, Anne Fleming, Miriam Lacroix, Taslim Burkowicz, Sam Wiebe, Amy Mattes, Louis Druehl, Sheung-King, Loghan Paylor, Lisa Moore (ed.), Sandra Kelly, and Robyn Harding for BCR]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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