![]() ![]() But he struggles to keep everything afloat.and sometimes he blacks out. Jared is only sixteen but feels like he is the one who must stabilize his family's life, even look out for his elderly neighbours. He can't rely on his dad to pay the bills and support his new wife and step-daughter. Jared can't count on his mom to stay sober and stick around to take care of him. Jared does smoke and drink too much, and he does make the best cookies in town, and his mom is a mess, but he's also a kid who has an immense capacity for compassion and an impulse to watch over people more than twice his age, and he can't rely on anyone for consistent love and support, except for his flatulent pit bull, Baby Killer (he calls her Baby)-and now she's dead. The exciting first novel in her trickster trilogy.Įveryone knows a guy like Jared: the burnout kid in high school who sells weed cookies and has a scary mom who's often wasted and wielding some kind of weapon. Everyday teen existence meets indigenous beliefs, crazy family dynamics, and cannibalistic river otter. And another important thing to note that the dialogue between Jared and his friends rang extremely true to me I have never read an adult writer who so accurately captured the teenage life before: the way they talk, think and act is so brutally honest, I wish all YA writers took a page out of the Eden Robinson lesson book.With striking originality and precision, Eden Robinson, the Giller-shortlisted author of the classic Monkey Beach and winner of the Writers Trust Engel/Findley Award, blends humour with heartbreak in this compelling coming-of-age novel. I disagree with this assessment for the reasons I mentioned above, but also because I’ve read other books like this, and believe it to be a certain kind of storytelling style.Īs for the writing itself, even though Robinson includes lots of profanity in the dialogue, she also includes beautiful descriptions of nature too, for instance: “Leaves fell on the windshield, curled, gold paper boats sailing to the ground” (p. I will admit that the book takes a pretty sharp turn towards the end, and a lot of it seems not only unbelievable but out of place. One review of this book found the transition into the supernatural world a difficult one because it overshadowed the first two thirds of the novel that described Jared’s family and social life. Not only do I believe it is important to read these books, I enjoy reading them because they offer such a valuable perspective on our Canadian history and culture. I should mention that even though I do feel isolated from aboriginal characters in other books, this never deters from reading about them. The difficult lives of Jared and his mother are hard to read about, but they were presented without blame or pity, thus allowing myself to move past the ‘us and them’ mentality that I can sometime feel like as a Caucasian reading a book about indigenous issues. ![]() This book involved a bunch of terrible people in terrible situations, but the supernatural aspects of it (a talking raven, a woman with a creature inside of her, cannibalistic river otters) gave me a story line to laugh at, wonder at, and thoroughly enjoy. ![]() The story is essentially a coming of age one, where Jared learns more about himself and his family as he deals with the shit show that is his life. However this book was funny, it wasn’t a comedy, but I connected with the main character Jared, even though he is someone I have nothing in common with: he’s a sixteen-year-old alcoholic who gets abused by his mother, deals drugs, skips class and carries a gun. Poverty, drug addition and violence seem to surface in most books about First Nations people, which is why I have to mentally steel myself before diving in. Unfortunately, I typically approach indigenous writing with a bit of apprehension, just because I usually find most of the characters and the situations they find themselves in depressing. I’ve never read any of Eden Robinson‘s work before, but people discuss her books like she is always writing something worth reading, so I had high hopes when I picked up Son of a Trickster. ![]()
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