Therese and Pierette and the Little Hanging Angel — Michel Tremblay

This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay's Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author's own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.

Three schoolgirls, �"Thérèse 'n' Pierrette” and their friend Simone, are caught up in the dark mysteries of their rites of passage: innocence moving into experience; life into birth. Circling around their uncertainties are cold, merciless predators, ready to strike at the slightest sign of weakness� -- the vicious hypocrisy of the Church, the cruel ignorance of the petty bourgeoisie, and the burning lust of the child molester.