She’s a Lamb!
by Meredith Hambrock
ECW Books
312 pages
$25
In Meredith Hambrock’s She’s a Lamb!, protagonist Jessamyn St. Germain doesn’t just dream of stardom—she demands it, claws at it, deludes herself into believing it’s owed to her. Hambrock shines a spotlight on this fractured and hungry protagonist, revealing a woman so consumed by her ambition that she becomes the architect of her own discontent.
Jessamyn is an usher at a rundown Vancouver theatre, tasked with babysitting the child actors in The Sound of Music, but in her mind, she’s Maria—the rightful star. Every interaction is a performance, every humiliation a seed for the glory she’s sure is coming. Hambrock offers a biting, darkly funny commentary on the pursuit of greatness in a system that eats dreamers alive.
Jessamyn isn’t your typical unreliable narrator—her sordid reality is laid bare not to deceive, but to justify, to rationalize her bitterness, her desperation, her delusions. Hambrock layers Jessamyn’s self-obsession with biting satire, exposing the cracks in a culture that fetishizes ambition yet punishes failure. “I don’t want to make it because some twelve-year-old girls in Iowa liked my crappy Rihanna covers . . . I want to be Rihanna,” Jessamyn says, revealing her simultaneous disdain and yearning for validation.
Jessamyn’s narration, for all its humour, reveals her flaws too plainly to ignore. Her delusions are tragic, her entitlement grating, and her slow spiral into despair feels inevitable. Her truest connection is with her vocal coach, in stark contrast to the clinical and strategic relationships Jessamyn typically maintains: “It’s like I’m buying a hand that can reach into my heart and remind it to keep beating.”
Hambrock has created a narrator pitiable for her delusion and self-imposed isolation. The novel’s genius lies in its duality: it invites us to laugh, even as it makes us squirm. Jessamyn’s voice—sharp, sardonic, often venomous—is the novel’s backbone, and Hambrock wields it like a scalpel. She forces us to sit with her failures and recognize ourselves in her desperation for validation. Jessamyn is not likable, but she is painfully real, her life a dark comedy of errors where the punchlines leave bruises.
She’s a Lamb! is a sharp satire, its humour undercut by the ache of unfulfilled dreams. It laughs at the theater world’s absurdities even as it mourns the lives left in its wake. Hambrock gives us a protagonist who is all raw nerves and misplaced hope. This isn’t a story about redemption—it’s about survival, clinging to the spotlight even when it burns. It’s messy, biting, and painful. But ultimately, She’s a Lamb! asks us to see Jessamyn for what she is: not a star, not a failure, but deeply human.
