This is one case in which you can judge a book by its cover, and it happens to be terrible. One star could possibly be too high a rating. It reads as if written by a 9th grade student with a C- grade in english.

I ended up just wanting to be more moved by these four characters than I was. The massacre that took Cheryl should have moved me more than it did. Her voice from the grave didn't move me. Reg certainly didn't move me with his supposed redemption. Jason's descent (and certainly his mind trick) moved me the wrong way, pushed me away from him rather than to him. Only Heather had the real power to move, and she squandered it with bad focus. In the end, life sucks, whether God is using the vacuum or not. And these four souls didn't get to me.

It actually pains me to give this book such a low rating. From page one, I just knew this book was going to be one of my all time favorites, and that sentiment grew and grew— until about page 130ish, when it went downhill FAST (and around page 150, when the author seemed to become suddenly deathly allergic to character development). What the hell happened?? I am heartbroken.

So we have four narrators for the four sections of Hey Nostradamus!: Cheryl, Jason, Heather, and Reg. They narrate their parts of the story in 1988, 1999, 2003, and 2004 respectively. Cheryl and Jason were high-school lovers in 1988. Heather is Jason's girlfriend in 2003. Reg is Jason's religious fanatic father. A horrific 1988 Vancouver high-school shooting which vaguely anticipates Columbine sets the narratives in motion.

Coupland's characterization of the four narrators is deft and sympathetic, or at least empathetic. The 1988 school shooting is portrayed with a mixture of horror, black comedy, and crazed heroism on the parts of some individuals, including Jason. The media frenzy afterwards, the desire to canonize some individuals, the problems of recovering from such things -- these are all marvelously conveyed.

Douglas Coupland doesn't always get his due as a major novelist because, like Kurt Vonnegut, his novels are so easy and natural to read that the whole thing can seem effortless. Perhaps even too entertaining. Perhaps, given the often bleak but also often laugh-out-loud comic touch Vonnegut and Coupland share, the novels can seem glib.

Hey Nostradamus! isn't glib. But it goes down so smoothly that one can perhaps be forgiven for finding it too entertaining to be taken as a serious novel. But it is serious. If there's closure, it's faint and conditional and human and humane. The plot takes turns at several points that are genuinely shocking in their unexpectedness, though they always remain this side of plausible.

Morally, the novel suggests that moral or religious certainty, the certainty of absolutism, can be horrifyingly toxic. It also suggests that people can change, but not always, and not always in time for that change to be meaningful to those for whom one changed. All this comes in that compulsively readable Coupland manner, funny and witty and floating on a vast ocean of sadness.

Powerful

Hey Nostradamus is composed of four parts which vary considerably in length, each a first-person narrative of a character linked in some way to one central character and situation (a high school shooting tragedy). While I wasn't particularly impressed with the first character's narration, I began enjoying the book more when I was half way through the second section and progressing into the third. The final section/character consists of only a few pages but they were excellently utilised to bind the rest of the book together in an understated but emotional ending. This finale shows a character's development which is unfurled excellently throughout the eyes of the other three voices composing the novel. Sadly, the progression of this character and his own short but impacting final addition to the four sections is not enough to distract from the shortcomings seen throughout the complete work. I found the high concept use of religion in the lives and minds of the characters to be distancing and quite annoying. The repetition of the theme of the belief in God is grating and detrimental to the beginning of the story, with the insertion of prayers in the first section working in a conceptual way to perhaps hint at the location of the narrator. While a cute idea, I personally found it to remove any believability to the character. It was the development of characters away from Coupland's high concept massacre and God scenario that made the book worth reading, and while both thoughts on religion and violent acts are of obvious interest to a wide readership, it feels like a vehicle used to latch onto a sense of shock value. Disappointing, but with some excellent characters and scenes typical of Douglas Coupland.

Hey Nostradamus! was Douglas Coupland's response to how media wrongly put too much focus on the perpetrators of the Columbine High School Massacre of 1999 rather than the victims themselves. With this novel, he explored the points of view of victims who were both directly and indirectly affected by the unfortunate incident. This way, Coupland gave each of them a voice that told the stories that media refused to pay attention to simply because of the lack of spice that will give them high ratings. It is an honest account of how ordinary these people's lives seemed to be until the first shot was made and the first blood was shed. Coupland wholeheartedly paid tribute to the victims whose names are already forgotten and whose stories will never be told.

The novel is divided into four parts, each focusing on a victim of the shooting in one way or another. It started with Cheryl, a young, cheerful, and God-fearing student who continues to have faith in humanity despite telling her story from what the readers assume is "heaven". She was one of the students who were shot and killed by the bullets released, and not only did her bright future die with her but also the chance of becoming the mother she just recently learned she would be.

Coupland explored themes such as teenage love, sex, religion, prayer, and grief, which is a combination that no one would expect from a book about a school shooting. He did this because the book indeed is not about the incident itself. It's about the people and their lives, feelings, and thoughts before the unexpected happened. He wanted these characters to be remembered as who they were and what they did to give them something to be remembered as aside from being a victim of a shooting.

This novel is relevant in today's time with all the shootings that have been happening in the United States, and I'm glad I found this book at a used bookstore. It showed me that it is not unfortunate circumstances that make us but the memories of love and joy we share to the people around us.

This book really moved me, which is a total surprise being that I grabbed it at the library because I liked its cover. I know this could have been a bad idea, but I guess sometimes a good cover leads to a good inside too. I love how the author gives each character a distinctly realistic voice, something that is rare in these multi-perspective volumes. It is beautiful how we see not only the perceptions of the character's own motives, but each person's perceptions of the other characters' motives as well. But what separates this book from other Rashoman type of tales, is how in the end things come together in a way that shows how even though we all are distinct in our ways of seeing and dealing with life, we're still in it together. And that, I think, is a very hopeful message. Great cover, great stories, great book.

This is not a book that might have gotten my attention on the bookshelf, but was recommended to me by two close friends. So I picked it up at the bookstore when it was on the bargain shelf for $5 and I had a gift certificate. It then sat on my shelf for a few months until I started this whole reading marathon.
I'm sorry I waited so long to read it. The way the 4 narrators told their stories and how you were able to understand how the actions of one person can affect so many people was wonderful. It made me think about how I personally feel about other people's actions and how I might not know the full story behind the scenes that led to how they might act.
I definitely recommend this book. It was a great read and one I'm glad I finally gave a chance.

3.5 stars

There wasn't a real distinct difference between the narrator voices, and that bothered me, but other than that, I enjoyed this book.

A school's 'religious clique' gets caught up on the wrong side of a school shooting massacre, andthis book tells the story of the shooting and how it impacted on the lives and families of two of the clique, who it turned out were secretly married!

Four narrators tell their stories mostly in search for meaning or understanding of the massacre. I found this a pretty gripping read from the start, at times tough at other times hard, but all done subtlety. This book gets a an M for Meaning of life - it may not provide the answers, but it asks the right questions. 7 out of 12

2018 read

It's hard to say any one thing about this book in an absolute 100% way. Basically, it's inconsistent in its quality. The characters often feel one dimensional, more like caricatures, but occasionally Coupland manages to flesh them out. Still, it feels exactly like that, attempts to flesh out caricatures. In some ways, the book poses as a novel about a school massacre, which isn't really accurate. And to whatever extent it is about a school massacre, it doesn't really do the topic justice. For example, it pales in comparison to something like We Need to Talk About Kevin, which I think is a flawed book in its own right. Despite all of this, Hey, Nostradamus! manages to have several 'good' bits and compelling sequences where the plot really gets going and pulls you along. Just, not consistently.