Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles

 Winter in Newfoundland is long, cold and hard on the people.  When a storm rolls into St. John's, it mirrors the storm raging in The Hazel where sex, betrayal, addiction and violence threaten to boil over and devastate everyone inside.

Billed as "biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking", I found this novel to mostly biting.  I did not enjoy the story despite it being a character study which I usually enjoy.  There were far too many characters that were not developed enough to keep track of, and even the ones that were developed were often presented as so tragic and utterly without redeemable qualities to like.  I didn't feel any emotion as the story unfolded.

The novel also took too long to develop any real substance.  It was not until about 3/4 of the way through that the direction started to make sense.  I feel that the novel was much longer than it needed to be for no reason.  

The only redeeming quality of this novel for me was that some of the language truly was poetic.  There were moments of beauty within the prose, but even then only enough to warrant a 2 star rating.