The Sopranos [Import] [Hardcover]

Alan Warner (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape; First Edition edition (1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0224052527
• ISBN-13: 978-0224052528
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bittersweet, October 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sopranos: A Novel (Paperback)

Scotland's Alan Warner is one of the best and most original writers at
work today. The only reason I gave this, this third book, four stars
instead of five is because his two previous, Morvern Callar and These
Demented Lands were so much better.

From the title, you might think
this book has to do with the opera world. Hardly. It concerns the
fifth-form sopranos at Our Lady of Perpetual Succor School for Girls
in the Scottish village of Port. the plot concerns a day trip the
girls (Orla, Kylah, Chell, Manda and Fionnula) are making from their
small village school to the city for the national singing finals.
While these girls are superior sopranos with beautiful voices, they
really don't give a hoot about music or the singing competition.
These five girls are completely focused on their free afternoon in the
city where they fully intend to prowl the local pubs for attractive
prospects among the opposite sex.

A local McDonald's provides the
place to shed their school uniforms and don the sexy outfits they
consider more fitting. Somehow, Warner gets the descriptions of the
clothes exactly right, even down to the girls' underwear. With their
makeup and nail polish applied, the girls head off, some directly to
the pubs, some to buy CDs, etc., before meeting again for rehearsal
with Sister Condron.

The book is written in dialect and that takes a
little getting used to, but not much. It would, in fact, have
suffered greatly had Warner not written in dialect. The dialogue has
a perfect air of authenticity about it: this is exactly what naughty
girls at Catholic schools do and say when the Sisters' are occupied
elsewhere.

The outcome of the singing competition comes as no
surprise and the girls are exhilarated. They head to the town's local
disco, The Mantrap, where they manage to fill the night with slow
dances with a group of submariners from the nuclear submarine that has
just anchored in the bay. Here, too, Warner captures perfectly, the
thoughts and feelings of Catholic school girls. In fact, he may have
captured them a little too perfectly; we feel almost like voyeurs.
Dawn finds the girls gathered for breakfast at the local station
buffet "none appearing much worse for wear."

These are not
wealthy boarding school girls. Just the opposite. They are from
poor, working-class families, something that makes their situation in
the book all the more poignant and bittersweet. This is it. Youth is
really all these girls have. None of them really has much hope or
much of a chance of escaping the grim and bleak future their parents'
are now living.

The book is not perfect. In a story told by
Fionnula, she resurrects characters from Warner's two previous novels.
This story has a distinct feeling of simply being tacked on (as well
as being a little too reminiscent of Trainspotting) rather than being
an integral part of the story of the sopranos and their day in the
city. The girls' story is good enough as it is; we didn't need to be
reminded of anything else.

The plot in this book is obviously more
contrived than in Warner's first two novels and, at times, it borders
on the preposterous. And, while the girls are almost perfectly
characterized, Orla's actions sometimes ring a bit unbelievable. Her
desires, especially her sexual desires, are just a bit too
sophisticated for a seventeen year old girl who is battling cancer.
Still, Warner has done a next-to-perfect job in his creation of the
five girls who make up the sopranos.

The Sopranos is definitely a
commercial book, but commercial doesn't have to mean bad, especially
not when it's as well-written as this one is. Morvern Callar,
however, is still Warner's most memorable and unique character and
These Demented Lands is his tour de force to date, a book that was so
heady and surreal it seems almost impossible to top. While The
Sopranos is extremely well-written and is, by turns, funny, sad,
comic, hilarious and tragic, it is a book that fails to reach the
status achieved by his previous two. Warner is such a wonderful and
polished writer, though, that top them he will. In time.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars outstanding welsh-esque coming of age novel, June 16, 2004

By 

justthegoodstuff (atlanta, ga) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sopranos: A Novel (Paperback)

After "slogging" (not in sopranos speak) through the first few pages of this exceptional story and getting used to the near-undecipherable vernacular of the sopranos, I was dead-on hooked. I can only describe this novel as a scottish female version of the movie "Go" or perhaps a tarantino-esque irvine welsh story, but that wouldn't do justice to the interludes of truth, meaning, and compassion that exist between outrageous scenes of cheerily lewd behavior. At the end, I knew each girl very closely and cared about the plights of each one - and, as in all good books, immediately wanted a sequel. So, you know what this story's about, just go grab it ASAP and thank me later, you won't be dissappointed.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful--The Best Book I Have Read in a Long Time!!!, August 7, 2001

By 

April (The Ninth Circle of....) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sopranos: A Novel (Paperback)

This was one of the best books I have ever read. If you are not used to the dialogues and accents used, then you might want to think of someone speaking the words as you read them--it helped me a bit. It may seem confusing or fragmented the first time you read it, but it's well worth reading again, and makes more sense the second time round besides. It really is a remarkable work of fiction--like you are reading the girls' diaries or looking over their shoulders. And, I definitely agree with the reviewers who said it would make a greatr movie, but only if it is filmed verbatim as written. Hurray for Warner! For this is truly one of the best works of our era.