This Might Hurt a Little. Be Brave: Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles

Author Origin: Newfoundland, Canada
Page Count: 422
Genre: Fiction
Difficulty: Hard
Grade Level: For mature adult readers only
Key Talking Points: Small town life, feminism and women's rights, the craft of language, relationships, honesty (to yourself and others), the consequences of actions
Sensitive Subject Matter: Graphically described sexual assault and gang rape, sexuality, violence

This book is a must read for anyone who can appreciate the beauty of language used to describe the most disgusting of acts. It is for people who don't shy away from the ugliness in our own world, but feel the need to bear witness in order to move us forward as a society. People who will dig through the ugly and the disgust to search for hope, a glimmer of love. This book hurts in so many ways, but as the epigraph says, if you can be brave, you can come out the other side stronger for it.


Summary: Over the course of one very long day, while a February storm rages and closes down much of Newfoundland, one restaurant stays open. That decision will force people together to confront things they would have rather left hidden, and face hard truths they'd been denying. Through a narrative that shifts its diction with its perspectives, readers are brought intimately into the minds of a variety of characters to hear and understand their side of the story, to pity those that were hated only moments before, and to weigh the justifications they give for the things they have and have not done in the days and nights, months and years, leading them to this day.

At first, this text is disorienting as we are thrown into the thick of it with one character after another, without much notion of how they all connect. As the relationships unfold, however, all of the connections linking them create a web of guilt and shame and regret, but also of love. The language is beautiful and more poetry than prose at times, which also makes this a book you have to really "sit down" to read. As mentioned above, each character, based on their education and class, speak and think in varying levels of accent or dialect, which is a nice trigger to help orient yourself in a new speaker. There are only large section markers that give a sense of time passing, no chapters, each new voice being introduced through slightly larger paragraph spacing and a bolded first letter.

When this book gets hard, and it gets very emotionally hard, there is no turning away from the contradictions and injustice of what is happening. The author lays bare all of the things our society wants us to think, or has been telling us to think, or has been beating into us about a woman's roles and expectations in society. How we are led to believe that a woman always plays a role in her own destruction. How we are told that consent is as easy as a yes or a no. We are forced to confront our assumptions and biases when they are all laid bare in front of us, and we are unable to look away. But you also won't want to look away, if only to be there, to somehow support the characters through what is being acted upon them. You'll want to scream "I see you" to both hold the guilty accountable and to validate the existence of those who are so marginalized that they barely cast a shadow onto the page.

Teacher Note: This book is not suitable for study at the high school level due to detailed descriptions of sexual assault. It is, however, mandatory reading for both women and men to bring to light the ongoing prevalence of women's issues and class struggle in our society. I would love to see this book on more post-secondary reading lists.

Final Thought: The character creation and vivid, poetic beauty of the language, all surrounding such powerful topics, will echo inside my head and heart for a long, long time.

📚 Ms. CAN Lit