Using a Vancouver Island city as a backdrop (likely Victoria but it’s never confirmed), Some Girls Do delves into the chaotic lives of more than a dozen characters in their mid-twenties to early thirties – a sizable undertaking for a short novel. In doing so, B.C. writer Teresa McWhirter unearths a community of “adult-kids” seldom chronicled in Canadian fiction.

McWhirter’s mostly female characters spend their nights lurching from one cheap bar to another, and their days nursing the wounds of the night before. With names like Blue, Carrotgirl, and Jezebel, these fast, hard-living women reject the establishment, and value freedom over stability and independence over marriage.

Characters appear, disappear, and reappear, their erratic movements captured in brief vignettes of clipped, rhythmic language. McWhirter’s judicious use of journal entries and letters fleshes out characters whose actions might otherwise be construed as cold and heartless, while realistic dialogue – heavily peppered with slang, swearing, and esoteric pop-culture references – contributes to the novel’s overall believability. The humour and wordplay alone mark McWhirter as a writer to watch.

The sheer number of characters, however, occasionally makes it difficult to sort out who’s who. Some of the sections are also marred by an uneven treatment of the material. For example, “A Girl and Her Father” is a moving, sombre chapter about a girl’s relationship with her dying father, but it’s tone is not reproduced anywhere else in the novel. As such, it reads more like a short story than a part of the larger whole.