You really want to like Philippa, the heroine of Sarah Dearing’s new novel,Courage My Love. Feeling like “such a wife,” she slips away from her pastel condo and her yuppie weasel husband, and immerses herself in the gritty pageantry of Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. There she rents a $50-a-week room, shucks her designer clothing in favour of vintage – Courage My Love refers to a Toronto vintage clothing store of the same name – and samples exotic fruit and patio beer.

The first chapter is arresting enough. Philippa’s flight is prompted by a dead shark in a fishmonger’s stall who tells her to leave her husband, and is solidified by an encounter with a local who brings her to her first-ever orgasm with just one scorching look. The rest of the book flips between her new life as Nova Philip, Groovy Chick, and her old life as Mrs. Philippa Marie Donahue, Trophy Wife.

As a character, however, Philippa seems so … dim. Why on earth did she stay with hubby for so long? And didn’t it occur to her that he would close the bank accounts when he learned of her defection? But what rankles most is the book’s assumption that squalor is somehow automatically cool and “real.” All Nova is really doing is going from a group that’s bourgeois (clean and drunk) to one that’s bohemian (dirty and drunk).

Dearing’s writing is accomplished and evocative, and her first book, The Bull Is Not Killed, rightfully won critical raves. In this book, though, Dearing’s point that people shouldn’t live plastic lives is swamped in a wave of contempt directed at anyone who’s not living free and easy.