Dodger Boy

Written by Sarah Ellis

Groundwood Books

978-1-77306-072-9

176 pp.

Ages 10-14

September 2018

Most people would not think of the 1970s as the setting for historical fiction but, at 40 plus years ago, it definitely qualifies, and it was a time rampant with fodder for fiction writers. From Apollo 13 to the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, the pioneering of in vitro fertilization and, of course, Watergate, the 1970s rolled through on a plethora of highs and lows. But for many it will be the decade during which the Vietnam War finally ended. Before that end, however, lives were being shaped by either going to war, protesting it or dodging the call to military service, and those who met those individuals were likewise forever changed. Such are the circumstances of Sarah Ellis's newest middle grade novel, Dodger Boy.

Vancouverites Charlotte Quinlan and her best friend Dawn Novak, both 13, attend a hippie event called an Easter Human Be-In. There, amidst the music and dance and fun, they meet Tom Ed, a draft dodger from Texas, who is invited to stay with Charlotte's Quaker family while he tries sort out his plans. When Tom Ed gets a job as a car jockey and has to drive a car up to 100 Mile House, Charlotte and Dawn accompany him. But while, Charlotte appreciates how Tom Ed talks to her like an adult, Dawn sees the trip as something else.

Meanwhile there is a war against the girls' teacher, who is affectionately known as O.O., from a parent seeking her firing for including the book The Catcher in the Rye in her classroom library.  Even within the context of a greater conflict, Charlotte is compelled to protest the censorship and the attack on her teacher, learning about civil disobedience and taking herself out from Dawn's shadow to find her own voice.

Dodger Boy piggybacks on an era of free love and peace but is embedded in a time of conflict. Sarah Ellis may use the Vietnam War as the big conflict, one between nations, but by including those involved with censorship  and between friends, she makes it personal. There may be discussions about pacifism and Nixon and the war but there is also much learning about differences and similarities between Americans and Canadians, about growing up and being an Unteen or a teenager, and about having a friend and being one.  It's a comprehensive look at the 1970s while still being selective about where Charlotte's focus is. Sarah Ellis, in her crafty subtlety, takes a massive picture of life in the 1970s and angles it at the individual, acknowledging what is important to Charlotte: her family, her friends, her school and the freedom to be her best human "be-in."

All the Things We Leave Behind

Written by Riel Nason

Goose Lane Editions

978-0-864-920416

240 pp.

Ages 14+

September 2016

There are so many incidents that can stand out small and don’t seem like anything at the time but end up meaning so much.  There are so many tiny twists in a life that you can never know the ultimate significance of. (pg. 80)

As teen Violet Davis looks back through her copious memories of incidents with her older brother Bliss and their parents, she now seems to see the significance of them with respect to his disappearance from their lives after graduation from high school.  There were all the signs of a wanderlust for moving beyond their small town of Riverbend and Hawkshaw, New Brunswick, for travel, for adventure.  There was also the darkness in Bliss that may have been triggered when the two first discovered the Department of Transportation’s gruesome boneyard of deer and moose road kills, perhaps Bliss’s “first proof of unhappy endings” (pg. 116) but this melancholy could not be repressed.

It seemed that every bad memory, in fact only bad memories, bubbled up in his brain.  His entire perspective changed and every thought he had was permeated and tainted, shifted and reinterpreted in a negative way. (pg. 116)

Now it’s the summer of 1977 and Violet’s parents are ostensibly on vacation, but really in search of  any evidence of Bliss’s travels.  And Violet has been left in charge of the family business, officially known as Charles J. Davis & Son Antiques but known locally and by all travellers as The Purple Barn, a roadside attraction and store brimming with crafty twig furniture and quilts and antiques and collectibles.

For Violet, the summer is more than just working at The Purple Barn, and keeping the busybody employee Mrs. Quinn in check; it’s also a time of hanging with her boyfriend Dean and best friend Jill and her boyfriend Johnny.  While her brother’s disappearance is always foremost in her mind, as she rethinks what she should have and could have done to keep him from leaving them behind, Violet is forced to struggle with two unrelated issues.  First, she must negotiate the purchase of the contents of the renowned Vaughn cottage, a grand home deserted after the drowning of the owners' grandson. Secondly, Violet is haunted by a white buck that no one else seems to see.  Is it Speckles, a piebald deer Bliss befriended years earlier,  or an apparition that is part of the rumoured ghost herd of the boneyard?

Riel Nason’s first book, multi-award winning The Town That Drowned (Goose Lane Editions, 2011), was a deeply moving examination of a small town dealing with its impending demise by deliberate flooding.  That community, Haventon, is now a memory in All the Things We Leave Behind, both as place and experience, but only one of many things left behind when people move, or die, or disappear.  Those things can be like the goods that The Purple Barn sells from estates or deserted houses, or the mementoes set to be bequeathed to family upon a grandmother’s death.  Or they can be people, like Violet, left behind when a brother goes exploring, or when someone dies.  It can even be the bones of the dead or their ghosts remaining to haunt people’s thoughts and dreams and nightmares.  The concept of things, including people, being left behind is a monumental one but one that Riel Nason addresses with sensitivity and completeness, understanding the nature of memories and mementoes as powerful beyond reason.

Having a reminder, a souvenir, to help you remember is great, but I think the best memories are through a special door in your mind that you can open without a key. (pg. 105)

Riel Nason’s writing, both intricate and profound in addressing the nature of loss and memory, does not dwell on grief, though the boneyard and the tragic deaths of the animals and people in the book are disturbing.  But, All the Things We Leave Behind is bigger and better than just that, instead becoming a souvenir in itself, one of  weighty contemplation and yearning for a past remembered and a future unlocked.  Even with the tragedies that unfold in All the Things We Leave Behind, there is a lightness and brightness in the darkness, and acknowledgement by Riel Nason that all the things we leave behind, tangible and intangible, become powerful tributes in their own ways.

Freedom's Just Another Word

by Caroline Stellings

Second Story Press

978-1-77260-011-7

232 pp.

Ages 12+

September 2016

From the title (taken from the song “Me and Bobby McGee”) to her unexpected stop in Saskatoon in 1970 and the journey Easy Merritt takes to meet up with her idol, Janis Joplin is the soundtrack for Caroline Stellings’ latest young adult novel, Freedom’s Just Another Word.  And what a soundtrack it is: earthy, guttural, soulful and rich with the blues.

But when she sang–oh, when she sang–that tempered-in-a-forge voice of hers was like a flame in this burned-out world.  You ’d have to be stone deaf or a cadaver not to be electrified by her; she could sound as smooth as the Southern Comfort that dribbled from the corners of her mouth, or as gritty as sandpaper.  And the way she clutched every stanza like it was her last made me shake with anticipation. (pg. 1)

Though her name might suggest otherwise, growing up half-black–the product of her black father’s affair with a white prostitute named Wendy Wood–in Saskatoon has not been comfortable for Easy (Louisiana) Merritt.   She may be good at car mechanics like her father but she wants to sing the blues, and the two venues in town, Saskatoon Blues and The Beehive are not willing to give her a chance.  So Easy saves her money from working at the garage and singing in front of the liquor store, playing her accordion and frottoir, for the chance to get out.  Her break comes after a fortuitous meeting with the great Janis Joplin when the Festival Express train stops for a booze run in Saskatoon and Easy helps the singer get a bottle of her much-loved Southern Comfort liqueur and earns an invitation to meet up with her in Austin, Texas the following week.  So, Easy begins her pilgrimage, accompanying two nuns, the upbeat Sister Beatrice and the sour postulant Marsha, whom she’d assisted in purchasing a used car, on their journey to a mission in Albuquerque from which Easy could head to Texas.

Like any road trip, Easy’s is a mixture of highs and lows, and more so in 1970 when the civil rights movement is struggling to get a foothold in both Canada and the US, and an eighteen-year-old girl of black and white parentage isn’t always tolerated, much less accepted.  And travelling the famous Route 66, a.k.a. The Mother Road, a road in the process of being retired for the faster, more direct I-40, foreshadows some mother issues with which Easy must grapple to understand herself and others better, if she is to make a success of herself.

Like her Geoffrey Bilson Award-nominated book The Manager (Cape Breton University Press, 2013), Freedom’s Just Another Word is a story based in the 1970s, a time often disregarded in much historical fiction.  But it’s an important time of change, with respect to civil rights and opportunities for women, and Caroline Stellings composes a story that is both embedded in the time yet universal in its themes of acceptance, tolerance, and family.  By taking Easy on a journey both spatially from Saskatoon to Albuquerque and Texas and back, and emotionally as she struggles with acknowledgement of her own family’s secrets and story, Caroline Stellings creates an alluring, cross-country excursion of the soul and heart which ends with finding enlightenment, sometimes closer to home than you might expect.

Pandas on the Eastside

by Gabrielle Prendergast

Orca Book Publishers

978-1-4598-1143-0

192 pp

Ages 9-12

October, 2016

Reviewed from advance reading copy 

Never underestimate the power of goodness to overcome that which others consider weaknesses: youth, poverty, lack of education, dysfunctional families.  Ten-year-old Journey Song doesn’t.  She sees beyond the slummy side of the 1970s Eastside of Vancouver and sees a community of friends, that includes classmates, school staff, street people and local merchants.

Some people call the Eastside a slum.  That’s because they are describing buildings and roads instead of people.  To them, people on the Eastside probably look poor, sad, uneducated, sick and worthless.  But I don’t care what they think.  To me, the people around here are friends. (pg. 1)

And she’s going to need all of them in her mission to help the pandas housed in limbo at a local warehouse while the governments of China and the United States engage in a bureaucratic kerfuffle regarding action during the Vietnam War.

Though Pandas on the Eastside is narrated by the youthfully buoyant voice of Journey, each chapter brings another Eastside community member to the forefront, from homeless Kentucky Jack and mentally ill Contrary Gary, to teacher Miss Bickerstaff and her black boyfriend Ben Wallace, and Officer Pete Baker, and grocer Mr. Huang. Everyone adds to Journey’s story, not the least of which is her father whom she meets for the first time, finally answering some of her questions about her heritage.  But, just like everyone else on the Eastside, it doesn’t matter where you come from but who you are now. For Journey, her now involves helping the pandas and hopefully spreading some happiness in a world filled with war and sadness and conflict.

Gabrielle Prendergast, who made her literary mark with young adult novels in verse Audacious (Orca, 2013) and Capricious (Orca, 2014), demonstrates a formidable skill for writing an intricately-plotted, character-filled middle-grade novel that confronts prejudice without preachiness.  Yet it’s Gabrielle Prendergast's rich setting that truly drives the story, providing the impetus for action and consequently acceptance.  Pandas on the Eastside is an uplifting story from a time long-gone but a place ever-present in heart and geography.


(A version of this review was originally written for and published in Quill & Quire, as noted in the citation below.)

Kubiw, H. (2016, September). [Review of the book Pandas on the Eastside, by Gabrielle Prendergast]. Quill & Quire, 82 (7): 37.