What Dennis Lehane did for Boston with books such as Mystic River and Small Mercies and Don Winslow did for Providence with his Danny Ryan trilogy, Ron Currie does for Waterville, Maine, with this equally stunning saga of a community mired in drugs and despair.
At its center is the titular Barbara “Babs” Dionne, who is the drug-dealing queen of a depressed Franco-American section of Waterville called Little Canada. Her ancestors came from France to Quebec in the 1600s and have suffered discrimination ever since. Assimilation would have made life easier for French-speaking Babs and her forebears, but fitting in wasn’t for them. When she was 14, Babs killed a cop who raped her, and she was stashed in a convent for her safety. Emerging five years later, she got married, had children, and now runs the community’s drug trade.
