What do you think?
Rate this book
Kicking Tomorrow
Eighteen-year-old Robbie Bookbinder is bummed out and bored, cut adrift in the mid-1970s – the decade he calls The Great Hangover. Sex feels outmoded, drugs don’t seem to deliver like they used to, and rock and roll’s a bust in tired old Montreal. Quebec’s arming up for a cultural revolution, and bike gangs are warring in the streets. In Robbie Bookbinder, we meet a character who embodies all the potential, self-delusion, and resilience of contemporary youth. All Robbie thinks he needs is a kick-start. What he gets is scared half to death, as he discovers that life only improves when you take a stand in it.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 28, 2011
By Daniel Richler, not Mordecai.
August 9, 2009
There's a description of sex, or maybe just of pubic hair, in this book that made me extend the period of my virginity by at least a year. I am not lying. This book is cover-to-cover unpleasantness.
June 14, 2012
This was awesome when I was an angry teenager listening to a lot of music regarding alienation and rage.
February 22, 2021
Keef! Pepsis! Did this suck? I can't remember. It caught my imagination when I was 19. Interesting Montreal and Canadian social mores, beer & pot, tunes, and coming-of-age, 70's, time capsule.
July 18, 2012
This came out the year I started teaching high school (when I was almost 40, with no kids) -- and it was more valuable to me than any textbook I'd read. I've gone though three copies (borrowed but not returned) and definitely would like to re-read it, 20 years later to see how I feel about it now - it's on my "read" and "to read" lists.
January 23, 2019
Make another book son of a great Montreal author who shall remain nameless.
Needless to say, I really really enjoyed this book. It captured Montreal, youth in rebellion and twisted summer love all too well.
Needless to say, I really really enjoyed this book. It captured Montreal, youth in rebellion and twisted summer love all too well.
April 25, 2018
A pretty fun book about a lot of teenage rebellion. Enjoyed it although I don't remember much.
August 29, 2018
A feeling of WTF as you start reading this book.
May 18, 2012
Reading Kicking Tomorrow in the summer of '91 just out of 4th year fiction writing inspired my street youth character Jamie, who goes through the Eaton Center and subways of Toronto wishing he had an edge like Robbie Bookbinder, until he finds a way to trust his own inner strength. In the summer of '91 and for the next several years I would have given this book all the stars I could. Twenty-one years later, going through an old box of the remnants that survived my flooded basement apartment, the pages of my own writing with Jamie wishing he was Robbie take me back to the energy Daniel Richler creatively captured of that place and time in youth where characters struggle to find the courage and survival skills to trust and be who they are.
December 21, 2008
Not really sure how I felt about this book. Since it was Canadian it was somewhat relevant to me, but the main character seemed so angry, so out of sorts. A very strange book that may make me not read any other Richlers.
November 13, 2014
This book got me into the punk scene as a teenager, and was read multiple times. I know it's not going to resonate with everyone, but if you're 15-19 and live in Eastern Ontario or Southern Quebec, it's awesome.
March 23, 2008
Fantastic title.
Read
May 7, 2016Read wayyyy back when, remembered it out of the blue today.
October 28, 2007
A Montrealer teen in love with a blond and the "Strolling Bones."
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews