From Lamb to Slaughter
She’s a Lamb!, Meredith Hambrock. ECW Press, 2025.
“How do you solve a problem like Maria?” This is the question that begins the musical, The Sound of Music, and the line that Jessamyn St. Germain, the protagonist of Meredith Hambrock’s second novel, She’s a Lamb!, is desperate to sing on stage. In front of a crowd of adoring fans. Because she’s a star. She is.
This novel is told from the point of view of Jessamyn, an actor — sorry, star — who hasn’t yet “made it” beyond playing frustrated housewives in television commercials, through no fault of her own, of course. She has a plethora of excuses for her lack of success, which may resonate with some writers: “I want to be discovered by the industry. By people who know something. . . . I want to make it on craft, on the purity of my talent.” In the beginning, there is a hint of truth to her self-deception. Don’t all artists have to believe in themselves even though some signs seem to be pointing toward failure? We find out she has a rival, Samantha Nguyen, whom she calls “the king bitch herself.” We learn about her two boyfriends: Anton, who began as her stalker, but whom she turned into her strangely toxic and violent, sexually charged boyfriend (“The rage, twisted up with love, with revulsion. The pleasure. The agony.”) and Vishal, a “a douchebag with something of a conscience” — a real estate-rich man with whom her relationship is borderline prostitution. At this point, it becomes clear we’re not in the hands of a reliable, likeable, or truthful narrator. But Jessamyn’s unreliability shifts into a fullfledged slide into much more sinister territory when she begins to make snide comments:
She’s got long, braided pigtails, this girl. I consider what it’d be like
to grab one of those pigtails and stick it in a paper shredder, just
watching it pull her face toward the blades while she begs me to
Turn it off, turn it off, oh please God turn it off.
Hambrock uses the setting of She’s a Lamb! — which takes place over the course of a production of The Sound of Music in a fairly small-time theatre on Vancouver’s Granville Island where Jessamyn works as an usher — to explore the toxicity that arises at the intersection of art and business and the inherent misogyny in art as capitalist endeavour. Jessamyn tries out for Maria and loses out on the lead role to her rival, Samantha Nguyen. Even Rudy, the annoying bartender who’s infatuated with Jess, is cast in a supporting role. The only part in the musical Jess is offered is behind the scenes — that of babysitter to the child actors playing the von Trapp children. Her dubious singing coach, Renée, convinces Jess that this is the director’s way of asking her to be the understudy to Maria without overtly asking her, in order to get around union rules.
And so, despite her hatred of children, Jess takes the job. There is a foreboding sense things are not going to go well for poor Samantha Nguyen as Jess vies for her role from behind the scenes, but Hambrock manages to surprise and horrify in unexpected ways as the book plays out.
Throughout She’s a Lamb!, Hambrock ponders the musical’s central question: what to do with a woman who won’t follow the rules, against the backdrop of the toxic business behind art? Through the child actors cast in The Sound of Music, we see the damage wrought by the quest for stardom at an early age. These children, robbed of their childhoods, behave like little business people while their parents treat them like financial deals. Rudy, back in Vancouver after spending years in choruses on Broadway, gives some insight into the downsides of the desire that drives artists. He tells Jessamyn that the point before “making it” — the striving — is better than the disappointment of “making it.” “[W]hat you’re doing right now is the best part,” he tells her, “It’s the best it’s ever going to feel . . . the part where you’re still full of hope.” When on Broadway, instead of becoming an actor, Rudy says he “just became [his] desire” — someone who wanted something. Hambrock takes the idea of desire beyond just the desire for artistic achievement, for stardom, and shows us that desire itself — this same thoughtless greed that propels our capitalist, patriarchal society — turns us all into monsters.
At its heart, the novel is a comment on an industry built around satisfaction of the male gaze and how it destroys the women who participate in it. It is the single-minded desire to please her father — who once had a life-altering experience at a production of The Phantom of the Opera — that leads Jess to downplay serious roles in plays in order to pursue musical theatre, and this relatively small role of Maria, at all costs. In fact, the desire for her father’s attention is the catalyst for Jess’s foray into acting. After pretending to faint in a McDonald’s line up beside him, Jess is struck by a feeling she will never forget “. . . sitting in the hospital bed, everyone gazing at me, giving me all the attention I knew I deserved and knowing that I’d just nailed that performance. I was flawless. I never felt more loved in my life.”
Sexual desire, as well, chips away at Jess in numerous ways throughout the novel, and its damage becomes increasingly obvious as the story progresses. By the end, we realize she’s associated being seen on stage with the paucity of her being seen as a person throughout her life:
They weren’t looking at me because I wasn’t onstage. I was
nothing. I was alone. But if I’d been onstage when that happened to
me? Well, I wouldn’t have been so alone, then, would I? Wouldn’t
have been so vulnerable to this perversion. I would be someone
worthy.
She’s a Lamb! is a page turner full of odd and audacious humour, with many twists and truly dark turns, but its entertaining humour and thrumming plot is layered with depth. One might say this book is a triple threat.
— Susan Sanford Blades’ debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the ReLit Award in the novel category and was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Read this review and many others in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025). Order the issue now:
Order Issue 305 - Autumn 2025 (Canadian Addresses)
Order Issue 305 - Autumn 2025 (International Addresses)
