A really clever, really readable and really good novel about writing and men and male relationships and society's expectations of men, especially "big men". Is there any female writer better than Coady at expressing the inner workings of the male mind? This novel is completely deserving of the kudos it has received.

A sassy yet inspirational yarn about a knitting group working on a wool banner for a hockey championship. Using a Rashomon-perspective, Coady digs into the group, until finally uncovering the secret that threatens to tear the banner apart....I think

Poor Lynn. A brutally bad book. If you haven't read her before read "Mean Boy" or "Saints of New Harbour" before this leaden bore. This novel uses the trite narrative technique of a series of e-mail to delineate the protagonist's tale of woe. It's a hackneyed technique and renders the novel flat and BORING. This book is not insightful as some have suggested, juvenile is the word that keeps coming to mind. I read thirty pages stopped and tried again, the second attempt I got through seventy before I could take no more. I've loved her writing before. Too bad, I really wanted to like it.

This may displace Strange Heaven as my favourite book by Lynn Coady. It's the kind of book that draws you into its world so that, on emerging, you're a bit disoriented, wanting to go back. Very well written, displaying the gift for characterization that is Coady's hallmark.

This book is told in a series of emails from one man to another. Gordon Rankin (Rank) is nearly 40 and is led to begin these emails by coming across a book written by a man who he considered his closest friend 20 years earlier. Rank feels the book betrays that friendship, exposing Rank's inner thoughts and yet still portraying him as a caricature. Rank is a big man and beginning with his father has been cast in a role that he doesn't want. The role is enforcer, bouncer, goon. His father, his university hockey coach, his friends, all consider him as a man who is defined by his size and not what goes on inside his head. He is haunted by a dual tragedy that occurred when he was a young man and has lived his life in fear of such a tragedy occurring again. This is a book to shake you out of your assumptions, to open your eyes to how we see each other. Particularly in light of recent tragedies related to those hockey players defined as enforcers, this is a book for the times. The novel shows insight, character growth, and shows our society in a new light. A wonderful read that I could barely put down.

I started off really enjoying this book, but now, in the middle of it all, I'm getting a little bored by the endless ruminations of the main character and the dancing around the issues in his life which brought him to this place. Also, some of the characters seem a little one-sided and wooden to me. There seems to be zero redeeming value in the father and nothing to possibly criticize in the mother and that leads me to wonder why they got together in the first place? Did neither of them have other qualities which drew them to each other?

"The Antagonist is a fine novel about a crucial aspect of growing up: learning to resist the roles that others thrust upon us. Failure to do so can only result in waking up one day to find that, instead of protagonist, we have become the antagonists in our own life stories, continually behaving in ways that fill us with shame." Giles Blunt Globe & Mail