The Sopranos

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. (Apr.) FYI: The Sopranos was a bestseller in England.