The sopranos

Charles Taylor

[Warner] honors these girls' belief that the freedom they seek is waiting for them in purchasing a new skirt...even if he knows that belief is an illusion....Warner's portrait of squalid Scottish port town life is grimly believable. Too believable....[He's] not listening to all that his characters say.
— The New York Times Book Review

Eve Claxton

The Sopranos is a fully realized novel by a writer in total control of his subject... Warner's descriptions of the transcendent Scottish landscape, which featured so heavily in his first two books, have only gotten better.
— Time Out New York

Michael Garry Smout

The Sopranos proved rather a playful, summer affair - hardly hot and sizzling - but sweetly memorable just the same...the novel ultimately succeeds despite its overtly commercial aspects.
— Barcelona Review

Stephanie Zacharek

A friend of mine who used to live near a Catholic school told me how one day, as he was goofing around in the street with his brother (both were well into their 20s at the time), the ball they were tossing back and forth rolled straight to the feet of a gum-snapping 16-year-old Cleopatra -- with eyeliner out to there and a pleated uniform skirt hiked up to there. My friend looked at his brother: "You go get it."

"No, you."

Eventually, someone girded his loins and retrieved the ball -- as my friend tells it, the braver soul managed to stammer, "P-p-please -- could we have our ball back?" But the fact that the enterprise required so much psychic energy demonstrates a point: Hardly the dewy-fresh things they're made out to be, young girls can be scary as hell.

They can also be, as Alan Warner knows, incredibly touching. And sometimes it's the toughest and trashiest-mouthed ones -- the ones who wear layers of lip gloss and blusher like a barrier between them and the world -- who get to you the most. In his third novel, the Scottish writer gives us a cross-section of one manically atypical day in the lives of a group of Catholic schoolgirls. In the morning they leave their small, dull port town for a choir competition in the city, where they eat at McDonald's, shop for miniskirts and sexy shoes and drink as much liquor as they can hold. After the competition, the bus has them back home in time to worm, wriggle and flirt their way into the local watering hole (all of them are underage), where they're hoping to meet sailors from the submarine that's just docked.

Warner pushes the action forward with dialogue that skitters and hopscotches almost randomly. The girls speak in a randy shorthand that betrays both their awe of sex -- emotionally speaking, at least, it's still a mystery even to the pregnant ones -- and their eagerness to jump right in. One girl greets Orla, a classmate who's recently been treated for cancer, hugging her and telling her she looks great. "Ah hear you went to Lourdes and all?" she says, to which Orla replies, "Aye, didn't get off with a single guy."

For a man, Warner understands the hearts and minds of girls pretty well; a love scene in one of the girls' bedroom is astonishingly tender and awkward. But what's most remarkable about The Sopranos is the way Warner teases fully formed characters out of a whirlwind of chatter, flirtations and confessions of fears and longings. Each of the girls emerges as something more than a sketch -- the way that with just three judicious lines a charcoal drawing of a nude sometimes conveys more about its subject than a fussed-over painting does.

The Sopranos is a book about some very funny, very likable girls, but it's also a clear-eyed, unsentimental love letter to feminine teenagerhood itself. Warner offers his manifesto early on: "They've youth; they'll walk it out like a favourite pair trainers. It's a poem this youth and why should they know it, as the five of them move up the empty corridors?" To Warner, youth isn't something that's wasted on the young; it's an allowance that's theirs to spend as they wish. There are worse things to blow it on than Big Macs, microminis and the relentless pursuit of love. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hottie-tottie Scots girls slosh and snog their way through Warner's (Morvern Callar) bacchanalian novel wi' no a care for the Queen's English and with envious contempt for the "trendy-****ing-city-lassie fashion victims" they encounter on a choir trip to London. The Sopranos, appointed leaders and cool girls of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, chain-smoke and doctor their hems--and see the choir's trip to the capital to compete in the St. Columba Choirs final as an opportunity to drink themselves silly and add to the notches on their French Connection belts. Away from their small coastal town the convent girls wriggle free of their inhibitions, leaving their striking poverty, dysfunctional families and village gossip behind. Their youth and vulnerability (extreme and fiercely guarded) do not accord with what they've already had to bear. Orla, suffering from Hodgkin's Disease, has not long to live; Fionulla ("the Cooler") keeps secrets about her sexuality; Kylah's beautiful voice is squandered on the "shite" band she sings with; Manda's so poor her father reuses her milky bathwater; (Ra)Chell has lost her two daddies to the sea; posh Kay is a dark horse, thought to be a "swot" who studies hard and rats. The pathos of these pretty young things in tight skirts--"damaged goods," as one of the unsuspecting and peculiar men who falls in with them thinks to himself--seeps in between the cracks of the restless, reckless adventure Warner stages for them. In pub after pub they tell stories on each other and get into scrapes, maintaining the buoyant, sanguine arrogance of youth and sexual power. Satirical, too, Warner's novel takes a final twist that proves these blaspheming, Christsaking little Catholic girls know surprisingly well the value of one's word.

Library Journal

Imagine a female version of Heaven Help Us with a bit of Trainspotting thrown in, and you have a good sense of Warner's third novel (after Morvern Callar, LJ 2/1/97). Set in his native Scotland, it focuses on six members of the Our Lady of Perpetual Succour school choir as they head off to the big city to participate in a national vocal contest. While Sister Condron, or "Condom" as she is less than affectionately called by the girls, is determined to win, her charges are much more interested in drinking, dressing sexy, and "snogging" boys. Indeed, they are determined to lose so that they can get home in time to meet the sailors whose submarine has just pulled into port. Underneath their surface hilarity, Warner makes clear the hysteria that drives them--their fear and anger at "the whole charade [played by] a young, lovely girl, lost in a city, unknown as to what she really wants and too lonely to imagine." This is likely to be popular with teens and twentysomethings, though some Catholic readers may find its representation of the church rather offensive.--David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Charles Taylor

[Warner] honors these girls' belief that the freedom they seek is waiting for them in purchasing a new skirt...even if he knows that belief is an illusion....Warner's portrait of squalid Scottish port town life is grimly believable. Too believable....[He's] not listening to all that his characters say.
— The New York Times Book Review

Entertainment Weekly

...[E]vokes rebellion, Catholic school-style, at a boisterous, fondly irreverent pitch.

Kirkus Reviews

A defiantly abrasive tale by Scots author Warner (These Demented Lands) chronicles the misadventures of a sextet of teenaged Catholic schoolgirls seeking excitement and dissipation.