Cadillac Couches
About the Book
Winner of a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal
Cadillac Couches is a picaresque road trip novel that journeys from prairie to big city and back again. A quixotic tale set in the late nineties and framed by the popular Edmonton Folk Music Festival, it follows two music-smitten twentysomething women as they search for love and purpose. Annie Jones is trying to put her big love, Sullivan, behind her and squash her demons of anxiety and compulsion. In a post-fest funk, she and her more worldly sidekick Isobel jump in Annie’s 1972 Volkswagen Beetle and race across the country to Montreal where her real-life fantasy man, Hawksley Workman, is doing a gig. A year later Annie and Isobel end up back at the folk festival, this time in a much different position.
A witty first novel, Cadillac Couches is a story about finding one’s holy grail in life. The book comes with its own playlist.
Reviews
“The road trip that accounts for the majority of the novel helps keep the story moving at a brisk pace, while also making the book as much an ode to Canada as to music.” —Quill & Quire
“I love this angsty, already-of-age, road trip tale of idealistic music worshipping and very real people who party and suffer as only post-eighties people know how!” —Ben Sures, singer-songwriter
“I really liked Cadillac Couches, a silly, sprawling road-trip novel with its very own soundtrack . . . The whole package casts a spell. For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, Cadillac Couches is a bit like a scrapbook, the coolest bits of every diary you ever kept. Watson shuns convention with her book’s conclusion too, its happily ever after coming courtesy of a refreshing dose of grrrl power.” —Kerry Clare, author of Mitzi Bytes
“Cadillac Couches reveals Watson’s ability to create truthful character and voice.” —The Coastal Spectator