It’s 1980 and 13-year-old Marnie Harmon is trapped in the suburbs. She’s surrounded by disco, polyester, patriarchy, and pervy teachers who seem to be sleeping with her friends. After an ill-conceived murder attempt on one of the said pervy teachers, Marnie is sent to an all-girls Catholic school. There she discovers the punk world — soon she is hanging out with strippers, drinking beer and smoking in the girls’ room. Yet the inanity of school and parents drive her to seek refuge in her dream of meeting John Lennon in New York. But New York is a long way from Ottawa and Marnie doesn’t have the bus fare. Will she make it to New York? Will she be thrown in jail for attempting to murder her teacher? Will music save her soul?
 |
YA winner of the 2008 New England Book festival award |
Reviews
“Mary-Lou Zeitoun captures the world of a teenager in all her funny, frightening, vulnerable, horrible, trouble and wonderful glory. There isn’t a thing out of place in the book. Not a word or an image or sock I could point at and say, ‘‘Aha! Wrong! Must do better!’’ 13 is too good for that. I loved it.”
—Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments
“What made 2002 wonderful was the mind-blowing work from new writers…. Zeitoun gets right into the head of a teenager growing up in 1980 in this kick-ass comic novel….”
—Susan G Cole, NOW Magazine
“Anybody fearing for the future of Canadian writing need look no further than the authors we are showcasing today…. Reading 13 is like going through adolescence all over again. Mary-Lou Zeitoun … has written a dramatic monologue in the voice of Marnie Harmon, a raging, passionate, smart and rebellious Ottawa teenager…. Marnie’s voice, trembling between the playfulness of a child and the sneering bravado of an adolescent, is captivating.”
—Sandra Martin, Globe & Mail
“Mary-Lou Zeitoun captures the self-obsessed, sullen, frustrating essence of what it is to be a semi-outcast adolescent girl so adroitly that I got spooked…. Here we all were thinking what misunderstood individuals we were and this woman sums us all up in 144 neatly bound pages.”
—Elizabeth Bromstein, NOW Magazine
“Zeitoun is terrific at setting, and has a cinematic sensibility … Zeitoun is also terrific at the pensive, vacillating, intimate, interior moments that really make a reader’s breathing shift.”
—Natalee Caple, Globe & Mail