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	Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland
		As with some of his earlier books, such as Microserfs and Generation X (because of which Coupland is generally credited with coining the term), his latest novel is a humorous and cynical critique of Western society and the direction in which it seems to be moving.
		Girlfriend in a Coma is primarily the story of Karen McNeil (the girlfriend mentioned in the title) and Richard Doorland (the boyfriend of the girlfriend mentioned in the title), two high school seniors living in late-seventies Vancouver.
		Girlfriend in a Coma contains some elements in common with Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, including the main narrator being a ghost and the end of the world being used as a plot device.
	www.unb.ca /web/bruns/9900/issue12/entertainment/book1.html (573 words)

	Girlfriend in a Coma (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Girlfriend in a Coma is a novel by Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland.
		The book was named after the 1987 single "Girlfriend in a Coma" by The Smiths.
		Girlfriend in a Coma has something of the quality of a fairytale, but it contains a sharp realism that makes the book scarily contemporary" (15 May 1999).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Girlfriend_in_a_Coma_(book) (431 words)

	[No title]
		Like his past book, critics are not quite enamoured with the story.
		The connection between The Smiths and Douglas Coupland in Girlfriend in a Coma.
		Seems Girlfriend in a Coma didn't fare well with CBC Newsworld.
	membres.lycos.fr /coupland/coupgc.html (78 words)

	Amazon.de: Girlfriend in a Coma.: English Books: Douglas Coupland (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		His books have gained cult status around the world, swiftly turning Coupland into an authority on the culture that rocked the 90's.
		His books have gained cult status around the world, swiftly turning Coupland into an authority on the that rocked the 90's.
		But unlike his other books, where this theme is subtly developed through a believable plot, this one practically shouts at you through the most preposterous of plots.
	www.amazon.de /Girlfriend-Coma-Douglas-Coupland/dp/0006551270 (1547 words)

	- naive - girlfriend in a coma by douglas coupland (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		- naive - girlfriend in a coma by douglas coupland
		Like pretty much every Coupland book (Gen X, Shampoo Planet, Microserfs et al) "Girlfriend..." follows the lives of a group of people who sit around and talk a lot about how their lives are empty and meaningless.
		The basic idea is that a group of teenagers are having a good drinking session in 1979 when one of them slips into a coma, where she stays for the next twenty years.
	www.ulfius.com /oldnaive/girlfriend.html (490 words)

	I KNOW, I KNOW, IT'S SERIOUS - AE:ONLINE March 12, 1998
		And Girlfriend in a Coma is intensely moral.
		The only "real" character in Girlfriend in a Coma, in the existentialist sense, is a dead man. Or boy; one of the narrators is the ghost of high school football hero Jared, who died of leukemia and returns, twenty years later, as a combination of Jiminy Cricket and deus ex machina.
		Her friends are drug-addled and alcoholic; her child (born during coma and out of wedlock) is already pregnant.
	www.mndaily.com /ae/Print/1998/10/storys/BOOKS1.html (867 words)

	Girlfriend in a Coma
		Girlfriend in a Coma absorbs the current millennial media-frenzy and invests it in a small group of teenage west-coasters hanging out in Coupland's native Vancouver.
		Karen had made love to Richard the night before her coma, and Richard tries to cope with a daughter (born perfect, nine months later), Karen's ongoing catatonia, his own sequence of McJobs, alcoholism and depression.
		Girlfriend in a Coma juxtaposes the slick confidence of youth culture with a clumsy, easy-to-ridicule search for a right-minded way of living.
	members.tripod.com /coupland/gc17.html (598 words)

	Girlfriend in a Coma
		So when Karen awakes from her coma on Nov. 1, 1997, she is mentally the same age as her daughter, Megan.
		Unfortunately, Girlfriend in a Coma unplugs itself from reality long before it touches on anything approaching a mature vision of the world.
		Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland, Harper Collins, hc., 284 pp., $27
	www.montrealmirror.com /ARCHIVES/1998/032698/book.html (661 words)

	Book Review of Girlfriend in a Coma only at RuthlessReviews.Com
		Promptly thereafter, a pregnant Karen slips into a drug coma for two decades only to emerge to a despondent world where her high school friends are failing miserably to form cohesive identities or assert themselves into the world.
		Following her awakening and reuniting with the daughter she never met, Karen is given the premonition of a severely prosaic apocalypse, and we are treated to an unlikely and highly metaphoric end of the world, one replete with philosophical musings about questions of identity and human meaning in the coming millennium.
		Given the premise of the novel, a woman in a coma for twenty years, it is essential to suspend disbelief to read the novel in the first place.
	ruthlessreviews.com /reviews.cfm/id/656/page/girlfriend_in_a_coma.html (344 words)

	Jason Pettus \| essays \| douglas coupland's "girlfriend in a coma"
		The first half of the book is classic Coupland: a group of high-school friends in suburban Vancouver in the late 1970s hang out, drive around a lot, talk about their dreams and aspirations, and do drugs.
		Girlfriend in a Coma is in many respects Coupland's "first novel," and we all know what a volatile experience a first novel can be (well, maybe you don't, but take it from me, it can be horrible).
		Girlfriend in a Coma is less a novel than it is a manifesto, a crude laying-out of what's to come, the genius work that's hopefully right around the corner.
	www.jasonpettus.com /essays/coma.htm (2666 words)

	Amazon.ca: Asleep: Books: Banana Yoshimoto (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Although each is sufferingAone in mourning for her beloved brother's death, one fragile at the end of a painful affair and one deeply involved with a man whose wife is in a comaAeach woman sees herself as an incidental or supporting character, in refreshing contrast to Western self-involvement.
		After reading this book, I'm compelled to seek out her other books, as this collection of novellas was a beautifully written, dreamy and engaging read.
		This book can be read within a few hours, as the language isn't as sophisticated as that used in most other literary works (because this book is translated from Japanese to English), but it is descriptive and evocative..not merely "simple" as Yoshimoto is too often described.
	www.amazon.ca /Asleep-Banana-Yoshimoto/dp/0802116698 (2221 words)

	Eye Weekly - On Page - 04.02.98
		As the only people left alive, the protagonists are talked through the crisis by the ghost of a high school classmate who died of leukemia.
		But, if Girlfriend in a Coma is an artistic failure, at least it is an interesting failure.
		See, colonialism isn't a theme one necessarily associates with Dickens (which is one reason why Said's book is so valuable), but Carey's last novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, was a surprisingly poignant examination of a culture besieged by that of a larger and wholly indifferent neighbor.
	www.eye.net /eye/issue/issue_04.02.98/plus/books.html (653 words)

	Book Information: Girlfriend in a Coma :: Internet Book List :: A database of book information and reviews
		Book Information: Girlfriend in a Coma :: Internet Book List :: A database of book information and reviews
		In 1979, Vancouver, Richard's girlfriend Karen, slips into a coma, after telling him she is expecting something to happen.
		While her friends, and daughter, grow up around her, they move slowly into the 90's and what was contemporary culture.
	www.iblist.com /book2217.htm (130 words)

	Book Reviews - C (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Imagine going into a coma for twenty years, and emerging to find your friends grown old, the Berlin Wall gone, sex gone deadly, and cars so aerodynamic - yet people were essentially the same.
		I feel that since Microserfs, his writing style has grown, and the beginning of the book - where everyone else stumbles from the seventies to the nineties - is well done.
		The tail end of the book, involving a dead childhood friend turned Angel, the awakening of Karen, and the end of the world seems to coast, and the last hundred pages or so drop the ball.
	www.rumored.com /lit-machine/reviews/c.html (713 words)

	Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!
		That book set the scene for the popular (but clichéd) slacker culture that developed in the 90's.
		His next book, Girlfriend in a Coma (1997), is another favourite of mine.
		The book is in 4 parts and each part is narrated, in the first person, by a different character.
	www.readwriteweb.com /archives/douglas_couplan.php (1104 words)

	Girlfriend In A Coma - @forums
		Wow, I just finished reading this book and it is absolutely fantastic, I couldn't put it down I really love Douglas Coupland.
		My boyfriend and I both read this book, and we were both disappointed by the ending.
		my personal favourite book by douglas coupland would have to be life after god, followed closely by microserfs.
	www.atforumz.com /showthread.php?t=45605 (233 words)

	Book Reviews
		This book is a 4 on a 1-4 scale, 4 being the best, and is aimed at girls aged 14 to 17.
		Jessica forages into the nightmare world of her books to discover horrifying and sometimes darkly cool things about herself and the demon world she thought was only in her head.
		The book follows after she is swept up by a race of people she has never known before, on an island she has only heard of in stories.
	www.teenlit.com /publish/index.php/bookreviews/2005/08 (1808 words)

	Book Review (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		While Karen languishes in her coma, Richard and his friends are eerily stuck in the same lives they've inhabited since high school; the outward details of their lives change, but inside, they fail to evolve.
		Many of these truths come to light after Karen awakens from her coma, and the world is paralyzed by a disease that strikes its victims with the overwhelming desire to sleep.
		Images of sleep abound in the book; sleep as metaphor for a too laid-back approach to life, sleep as metaphor for the death of the planet.
	www.caffeinedestiny.com /books/girlfriend.html (441 words)

	Girlfriend In A Coma \| The Onion - America's Finest News Source
		Girlfriend In A Coma, set in Vancouver, takes its name from a Smiths song, and much of the book reads like it's aimed at the same teenage boys and girls who mope to Morrissey.
		Karen is a 17-year-old who loses her virginity in 1979, then almost immediately falls into a coma that lasts for 18 years.
		Girlfriend In A Coma is a weird, rambling foray into science fiction and It's A Wonderful Life-style hypothesizing that fails to amass much sympathy for any of the characters—who spend much of the novel doing drugs, drinking, and talking about pop culture like leftovers from a Bret Easton Ellis story.
	www.theonion.com /content/node/19204 (379 words)

	The Globe and Mail: Series
		Douglas Coupland's novel treats coma as a metaphor for the way we sleepwalk through a cultural trashpile, but it also presents its Gen-X characters with the opportunity to begin anew.
		After all that ardent exposition of the transitory in Generation X and Microserfs, now comes a bigger, broader-themed book in which the man who gave a name-brand to a generation becomes, bizarrely, the conscience of a generation.
		The elements that catapult the story -- ghosts, alfresco sex and a coma -- are the sorts of fantastically sexy events that might be celebrated in a a song by any number of gloomy goth-rock bands.
	www.theglobeandmail.com /series/genx/rev_girlfriend.html (1094 words)

	Alibris: Coma
		Considered one of the best books of the genre--and the book that launched Robin Cook 's career, earning him the reputation as "the" master of the medical thriller--"Coma" celebrates the 25th anniversary of its publication with this special mass market edition that includes a letter to readers from the the author.
		Advances in the knowledge and understanding of stupor and coma, aided by the considerable impact of CT scanning on neurological diagnosis, are reflected in the new and substantially revised edition of a classic volume.
		This book recounts that mysterious, dramatic journey--a trip to the underworld of disease, a place where death is constantly close.
	www.alibris.com /search/books/subject/Coma (1267 words)

	Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland: Book Reviews: Calderdale Council (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		'Karen, 17 years old and pregnant, goes into a coma and awakes 17 years later to meet her now teenage 'baby' and her friends who are, of course, 17 years older.
		One of the group, the eponymous girlfriend, falls into a coma - she comes out of the coma in 1997.
		The second part covers the intervening years, following the remaining friends and the deterioration of the girlfriend until she awakes and then her rehabilitation.
	www.calderdale.gov.uk /libraries/books/reviews/bookreviews.jsp?id=872 (577 words)

	DesiJournal.com - Asleep
		There is a universal theme of a "spiritual sleep." Yoshimoto arrives at unusual predicaments to pull in a unique state of sleep for each of her characters.
		Her boyfriend’s wife is in a coma and he sardonically jokes, "It seems like every woman I know is fast asleep." The memory of her friend Shiori maintains her, and in her exhaustion, it seems Shiori does do more.
		Due to the tone of the book, Asleep might find it tougher to be a commercial success; yet to her fans, it is worth exploring.
	www.desijournal.com /book_print.asp?ArticleId=100 (718 words)

	Arcadia High School Book Reviews
		The whole book is based on their struggle as they try to break the grip the aliens have over them and sway the balance of power in their favor.
		I enjoyed this book because it teaches you how bad your life could be and that you should be happy to have a family that loves you.
		The book was a like different of me, but to a boy between the ages of 13-16 the book would be perfect to read.
	www.greece.k12.ny.us /arh/library/arcadia_high_school_book_reviews.htm (4674 words)

	Ken Varnum's Book Reviews (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		One of those books that everybody in the online world seems to be talking about, Cluetrain Manifesto is a cry to corporate America to wake up and smell the 'net.
		Niven spins a tale, based on the universe of some of his short stories from the 1960s and 1970s, to explain why Mars appeared a watery and living world to 19th century astronomers yet turned out to be dry and dead by the time we sent spacecraft into Mars orbit.
		The book that the HBO series was based on.
	www.varnum.org /books.html (1510 words)

	Girlfriend in a Coma
		Books, like movies, exist both to entertain and to challenge.
		It is a rare form of media these days that has one walk away from it in a stupor.
		"Girlfriend in a Coma" struck me in almost the same way - that when I finished it, I just strolled around in this sort of daze for fifteen minutes or so while I soaked in what I had just read.
	members.tripod.com /jweiss1/bookreviews/girlfriendinacoma.htm (116 words)

	THE MYSTERY READER reviews: The Missing World by Margot Livesey
		Jonathan Littleton realizes he has a unique opportunity to repair his timeline when his ex-girlfriend is hit by a car and, during a five day coma, loses her memory of what occurred in the last three years.
		The book is written so truthfully that we understand why Hazel’s parents and even her best friend go along with Jonathan’s lie that Hazel will be coming home to his apartment where they will resume the life, including marriage, he expected to have with her.
		It is perfect for a book club, or a college lit class where you get a headache explaining to each other what the author really meant.
	www.themysteryreader.com /livesay-missing.html (331 words)

	Amazon.com: Girlfriend in a Coma: Books: Douglas Coupland (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		"Girlfriend in a Coma" is one of those titles that just sucks you in, and on the advice of a pal, I started reading the works of Douglas Coupland with this book.
		The first half of the book is basically about Karen's coma and how it affects the people around her; the second half is the surreal, semi-supernatural apocalypse.
		The first half of the book was well-written and charming while the second half transformed into a heavy-handed morality play written by a strange crossbreed of Sheri S. Tepper and Dean Koontz (not a pretty thing).
	www.amazon.com /Girlfriend-Coma-Douglas-Coupland/dp/0060987324 (2914 words)

	Girlfriend in a coma by Douglas Coupland \| LibraryThing
		Girlfriend in a coma by Douglas Coupland
		The problem, I think, is that it feels like several books mushed together: there's the Jared-the-ghost plot (similar but less effective than dead!Cheryl's narration in "Hey Nostradamus!"), the late '70s vs. '90s plot, the actual girlfriend-in-a-coma plot...and just when you're adjusting to all of that, there's the post-apocalyptic plot.
		It was tiring; even the fantastical, when everyone falls down and sleeps and dies, save for a select few; once the initial shock and excitement is gone, all that remains is the rest of the book to slog through, to a sub-"Angel" ending.
	www.librarything.com /work/894 (450 words)

	Salon \| Books: Girlfriend in a Coma
		So if the characters in "Girlfriend in a Coma" strike the reader as remarkably unengaging, that's OK, because that's how they are supposed to be.
		"Girlfriend in a Coma" is another glum Coupland novel that never musters the strength to get satisfyingly morose.
		Karen McNeil, a 17-year-old girl, goes into a coma in 1979 and wakes up in 1997 -- mental faculties intact.
	www.salon.com /books/sneaks/1998/03/27review.html (488 words)

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