The Ruinous Sweep

Written by Tim Wynne-Jones

Candlewick Press

978-0-7637-9745-7

400 pp.

Ages 14+

June 2018

You're a traveler in a land that is part memory, part dream, and with all vestiges of the kind of pain that only the living can feel.  (pg. 127)

Donovan Turner, 17, is a reluctant traveler but one just the same. He is everywhere and nowhere.  He is running away from his sleazy dad Allen, with whom he's supposed to stay while mom Trish and boyfriend Scott are off camping in Algonquin Park. He is hitchhiking in the rain. He's hallucinating, he is disoriented and nothing seems real.  But it's far too real.

As the reader accompanies Donovan from one precarious situation to another, the teen's confusion is palpable. He worries that he has caused an accident that kills a man with a briefcase full of money, which Donovan takes. He finds his way to a farm where he hides the money and discovers his bruised and bloodied father drinking and playing cards with two rough-looking men. How could that be? Donovan can't figure out what he did, if he's guilty of anything for which he is accused and all he wants to do is find a way to connect with his girlfriend Beatrice.

Bee too is trying to figure out the story but she's starting at it from the side of Donovan's hospital bed. The story she hears from the police is that Donovan was a victim of a hit and run just outside his home, but they're also investigating the death of Donovan's dad. Bee doesn't believe that Donovan killed his dad but the few murmurings from Donovan, which she records in her journal, have her determined to protect him and learn the truth herself.

While Donovan is navigating new worlds, trying to understand his circumstances, wondering if he is dead or can make things right, Bee is looking for the answers the police will not pursue. Allen was a reprehensible person whose actions "had landed him in a country tattered around the edges and peopled by all manner of fallen comrades: addicts and losers and barstool prophets; the let-down, it-wasn't-my fault crowd" (pg. 93) and Donovan intended to stop seeing him. But would Donovan take his own baseball bat to his father?

Tim Wynne-Jones knows how to tell a great story.  He has won two Governor General's Awards for English-language Children's Literature (Some of the Kinder Planets, 1993, and The Maestro, 1995) and his last three novels have been short-listed for that same notable award. Though his middle-grade fiction is unsurpassed for its empathetic characters and depth of plotting, I believe his young adult suspense novels (check out my review of Blink & Caution), to which we can add The Ruinous Sweep, are unparallelled in the complexity of their mysteries and magnitude of their stories.  The Ruinous Sweep is a layered and woven story of so many dimensions that the reader can be forgiven the need to pause. While Bee's story line is essentially one of progression from learning of Donovan's accident and solving the mystery, with the occasional memory of their dating, Donovan's is complicated. His story is a tragic one that goes backwards and forwards and sideways. It's one of anger, shock, violence, running from and to, and connecting.  He's in limbo and looking for salvation. 

Readers may recognize references to Dante's Divine Comedy throughout The Ruinous Sweep from characters including Beatrice, the Pagans, and the Virgil-like Jilly, and other attributes such as the deadly sins of wrath and greed.  While these references to Dante's epic work provide additional scope to Tim Wynne-Jones's story, they are not everything. The Ruinous Sweep is, in its lyrical telling and intricate mystery, as daring as YA just as Dante's work is as epic poem.

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Check back tomorrow for my interview with author Tim Wynne-Jones and an opportunity to win a free audio book edition of The Ruinous Sweep, read by Tim Wynne-Jones. This giveaway is open to Canadian and US residents.

Burned, Exposed, Unleashed: Retribution series

But each of us had taken on the responsibility of protecting or avenging those few who had become dear to us.  Willing to risk our lives to see justice done.  We were all so different and yet so much the same. (Exposed, pg. 86)

Three teens: Josie, Raven and Jace.  Three injustices needing to be righted.  One series.  Retribution.

Exposed
by Judith Graves
Orca Book Publishers
978-1-4598-0726-6
137 pp.
Ages 12+
October 2015

Although the three books in the series can be read in any order–I read Unleashed first, then Burned and Exposed–and my image shows the books in alphabetical order,  I’d like to start with Judith Graves’ contribution to the series, Exposed.  Exposed is Raven’s story.  Raven, who has left the home of her meth-addicted parents, has found a new family working with other young people as an urban climber getting into high-end, secure car parkades to steal cars for Diesel.  And climbing is a release for her.

From here all my worries seemed smaller, so small they could be tucked away in my pocket and forgotten, like empty candy wrappers that would someday just slip away unnoticed.  (pg. 32)

Raven anticipates leaving this life when she turns 16 in a few weeks, diligently going to school and secretly saving her money and purchasing a houseboat for herself, and, to that end, Diesel has her training a younger climber Supersize.  But when Diesel sets up Supersize before he’s ready to lead a team and tragedy ensues, Raven is determined to get even with Diesel.

Burned
by Natasha Deen
Orca Book Publishers
978-1-4598-0726-6
161 pp.
Ages 12+
October 2015

While scouting out cars to steal, she meets Josie, the main character in Natasha Deen’s Burned. Jo has been on the streets for two years and has learned the way to survive is to trust no one, show no fear and that “hope is just another way to spell dead” (pg. 26).  But, though Josie has found a way to make herself useful,  scouting security leaks for a family grocer, helping stock shelves at a community kitchen, and painting art forgeries, she’s still looking for retribution against the woman responsible for the deaths of her mother and younger siblings.  Josie is out to

Burn her with the same heat she used to set my life on fire, and the orange red flames that scorched the breath from my family will cauterize her soul. (pg. 3)

Josie is out to prove this woman cop shot her family and another young woman, but she needs the help of  ATM Guy whom she spots using his tech skills to steal money at the family grocer.  When she approaches him to try to get evidence from the cop’s laptop, she learns that his name is Bentley and his brother is Jace, whom she refers to as Boxer Boy because of his physique, and so the third protagonist is introduced.

Unleashed
by Sigmund Brouwer
Orca Book Publishers
978-1-4598-0726-6
160 pp.
Ages 12+
October 2015

Jace, Sigmund Brouwer’s protagonist in Unleashed, leads a double life: one as a boxer slumming it at Billy’s gym, and one as the preppie, chess-playing son of disgustingly wealthy and emotionally-abusive Dr. Winchester Wyatt.

Life, to me, was a combination of chess and boxing.  You had to think everything through a couple of moves ahead and also be prepared to pound hard and often. (pg. 107)

Jace  is determined to get something on his father, especially because of the  horrific way he treats Jace’s tech-brilliant younger brother, Bentley, who was born with Laron syndrome which manifests as dwarfism.  Though he enlists a private detective and then Raven and Josie’s help to learn of some scandal in Winchester’s medical background, Jace has major trust issues and has to find a way to determine whom he can expect to be forthcoming and cooperative without taking advantage of his wealth.

The stories in Retribution are complex and intricate and the plot and characters interlaced in sophisticated weaves.  Writing the books must have been a complicated process for Judith Graves, Natasha Deen and Sigmund Brouwer.  But, the three authors stepped up, pen or laptops in hand, and were able to create a coordinated story with multiple plotlines while keeping their own writing voices unique and distinct.  That’s quite an accomplishment, especially for high-interest YA told in about 150 pages each. And, in the end, I believe that, though Raven, Jo and Jace are involved in less-than-legal schemes to get retribution, readers will admire their determination to seek justice.

I stopped thinking about my sorrows and focused on something else. Infinite possibilities. (Unleashed, pg. 160)

I’m hopeful that Jo, Raven, Jace and Bentley will continue to be that irrepressible team that is “living in the shadows, dispensing their own kind of justice” (Unleashed, pg. 156) and I look forward to their next quests for retribution.

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Remember: Orca Book Publishers has a contest on until November 30, 2015 (see my post about it here).  It's all about those infinite possibilities.

Retribution: Trilogy and Contest

A new, young adult, high-interest series

from Orca Book Publishers

Retribution

is just out 

and 

there's a contest!

The three books in the series,

which can be read in any order,

focus on three teens who come together to get Retribution

for the misdeeds, crimes others have committed against them and those they love and want to protect

"Tarnished warriors out to take on the big bads with a bit of beauty, brawn and brains." 

(from Exposed, by Judith Graves, pg. 87)

Burned
by Natasha Deen
Orca Book Publishers
978-1-4598-0726-6
161 pp.
Ages 12-17
2015

Exposed

by Judith Graves

Orca Book Publishers

978-1-4598-0726-6

137 pp.

Ages 12-17

2015

Unleashed

by Sigmund Brouwer

Orca Book Publishers

978-1-4598-0726-6

160 pp.

Ages 12-17

2015

And here's the contest:

Contest runs from October 13 to November 30, 2015

I just finished all three books, which I will review shortly,
and know it's worth entering the contest
for that $100 gift card you can use
 for the books in the Retribution series or for any of Orca's publications

Good luck!