The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, by Ron Currie (2025), 368 pages
Babs is the matriarch of a
Franco-American all-woman crime syndicate in Little Canada (Waterville, Maine).
She is a proud French-Canadian American and Catholic. She is determined to keep
those identities strong in her rural Maine town. To help her are her
drug-addicted daughters and a cadre of like-minded local women. Her stronghold
has been noticed by another narcotics gang and things come to a head with devastating(?)
consequences.
This sounded interesting on
paper and was a good read, but it could have been a great read. It was nearly
impossible to connect with any of the characters and they had few redeeming
qualities and the author did not give us enough backstory to sympathize with
their current situation. I still don't understand why Babs was so determined to
cling to her heritage when we are never given an opportunity to understand why
it is so important to her. While French-Canadians were definitely not treated
fairly and that was painful as a child, her family did not seem particularly interested
in maintaining their cultural background. Babs, while trying to mother the
community, seemed to be a pretty terrible mother to her actual children, yet
they had a weird loyalty to her. Perhaps if Currie and delved more into Babs
rise as the gang leader, it would have been easier to connect to the story as a
whole.
