School Book: The Double Hook

Shelia Watson's The Double Hook is the first book on the reading list for Canadian Prose. We're going to be looking at it over the next week and a half, so I wanted to get it done as soon as possible. Luckily The Double Hook is a small book, so I knew I'd be able to finish it quickly and move onto better things (like The DaVinci Code!)

The Double Hook is a strange book. When I first started reading it, it reminded me of A Million Little Pieces; Watson does not use quotation marks for dialogue. But The Double Hook is written better than A Million Little Pieces. The lack of quotation marks is not distracting at all; you can easily keep up with the story.

But the story itself wasn't that spectacular. The Double Hook is about a small community of only about 20 people. A woman has died and people keep seeing her fishing. There's this one guy named Kip whom everyone seems to hate for no reason. Yes, the book might have been well written. But the story was hard to follow, and things seemed to happen for no reason at all. If it weren't for my Canadian Prose class, I would never have picked up The Double Hook. And I don't think my life would have suffered at all for the lack of reading this book.