Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson Polytechnical University.

Michel Tremblay’s latest satire follows four event-filled days in the
lives of three convent school girls in early 1940s Montreal.

On the one hand, Tremblay draws an affectionate and sympathetic
portrait of daily family life in Québécois society, while on the other
he portrays the joys, terrors, and cruelties of childhood, and deftly
skewers the intolerance and hypocrisy of the church, the power struggles
and machinations of convent politics, and social attitudes toward the
poor.

Tremblay peoples the novel with well-developed, memorable
characters—psychic family members who communicate with ghosts, a
sadistic mother superior, and the three little girls (Thérиse and
Pierrette, the protectors of their friend Simone who has just had an
operation to correct her harelip). The novel culminates in an
unforgettable lampoon of the repository for Corpus Christi, a hilarious
and disastrous Disney-like extravaganza in which Simone is the hanging
angel.

This second novel of five in the Plateau Mont-Royal series, is funny,
moving, and thoroughly entertaining.