Blood Brothers

Written by Colleen Nelson

Dundurn

978-1-459737464

216 pp.

Ages 12-15

February 2017

Reviewed from advance reading copy

"...just cuz we share blood, doesn't make us brothers." (pg. 208)

Brothers are born and brothers are made through commonalities in purpose and temperament.  But does one kind of brotherhood surpass the other? How do you weigh what one brother means to you against another?  These are the questions being asked throughout Colleen Nelson's new work of young adult fiction as two fifteen-year-old boys steer through life, amidst the poverty and violence of a tenuous world and one of apparent opportunity for better.

Jakub Kaminsky admits that he has a sad little life. His parents emigrated from Poland for a better life before his mother died giving birth to him.  An injury at work left his devout father with a mangled leg and unable to work.  Now the two live in a rooming house on the West Side and attend and volunteer at St. Mary's, the parish of Father Dominic.  Jakub works hard at school and gets good grades, but he's truly alive when he's tagging as Morf.

Lincoln Bear may live with his mother and father and younger brother Dustin, for whom he tries to be an attentive big brother, but his home life is hardly comfortable, emotionally or financially.  When 21-year-old brother Henry returns from eighteen months in prison and promptly reestablishes his connection to the Red Bloodz gang, Lincoln is pulled in, hopeful of reconnecting with his brother and making a better life for himself. But restoring that relationship entails Lincoln becoming involved in jacking cars for a chop shop the gang runs which leads to more dangerous and illegal activities.

Jakub knows Henry is using Lincoln but he has no defence when he himself is involved in illegal tagging, especially after Lincoln takes the fall when they are almost caught by the police.  With Jakub starting as a bursary student at the prestigious St. Bart's school, and Lincoln falling deeper under the thumb of his violent brother, it becomes evident that the friendship between the two teens is at risk.

The survival of their friendship ends up being the least of their worries, though it is a driving force, when Lincoln becomes involved in a murder, and Jakub finds a very public but dangerous way of revealing the perpetrators. Blood Brothers culminates with a violent struggle between brothers of different kinds and very real consequences for all involved in desperate ventures.

"It's too late, I want to tell her.  It's like when water gets sucked down a drain.  Stuffing a finger in to stop it won't do any good.  The water still slips away." (pg.161)

Colleen Nelson leaves no time or breath of respite for the reader who is thrown from one harrowing situation to another, as both Jakub and Lincoln attempt to create lives that matter for themselves.  Yet, with all the poor choices the two make–and there are many–they are guided by a desire to be part of something good whether it be family, friendship, church or school. They want to be persons of consequence, because of their art or their presence or their actions.  They want what everyone wants: to matter.  Whether that happens depends on where you start and where you go and all the steps you take in between.  For Jakub and Lincoln, whose voices Colleen Nelson asserts both honestly and compassionately through those strides and missteps, it's their brotherhood that walks with them, leaving its own footprints.


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Be sure to check out Dundurn's book trailer for Blood Brothers at https://youtu.be/k026kfO89L4.

Uploaded to YouTube by Dundurn Press on November 24, 2016. 

Feathered

by Deborah Kerbel

Kids Can Press

978-1-77138-341-7

144 pp.

Ages 9-13

April 2016

Hope can take many forms and be elicited in a myriad of ways.  For Finch Bennett, an eleven-year-old girl in the summer of 1980–a time of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope, the hostage crisis in Iran, and the Rubik’s Cube-she needs to find some hope, somewhere, anywhere.  Her father died of cancer less than a year ago, her grieving mother is despondent and oblivious to Finch and her older brother Harrison who is also seemingly indifferent to the young girl, allowing his friend Matt to relentlessly torment her.  For Finch, hope might be found in the tiny scar on her neck from which a single white feather had been removed at age 3.  With that scar, Finch reassures herself that a better life, perhaps one of feathers and flight, might emerge.

“That night, I dream about my feathers.  They’ve grown in all white and fluffy and smooth.  And I’m happpy because it means I’m finally able to fly away. I spread my feathered arms and fly up, up, up to where I think I’ll find heaven…where I know I’ll find Daddy.” (pg. 49)

With the arrival of their new neighbours, Finch sees another opportunity for hope, especially with making a new friend of eleven-year-old Pinky Nanda.  This would  be particularly important once dreaded school starts.  School is where Finch is called slow and lazy. It’s where she has major difficulties with writing. And it’s where she sees her former best friend, Karen, has blossomed into a young woman and hangs out with similarly pubescent girls.  But Pinky and her younger sister Padma are staunchly protected by their parents, who argue about how Punjabi Hindus are treated in Canada and do not permit the girls to interact with others.

“It’s at that moment when I see myself right there in her face.  I see a girl who’s trapped in a mess of grown-up problems.  A girl who’s struggling just to figure it all out.” (pg. 94)

Strangely Finch’s only friend becomes an anonymous writer with whom she communicates on a bathroom stall door. That is, until Finch finds the courage to untether herself and communicate her feelings, good and bad, with those impacting her life.

Deborah Kerbel may have written Feathered as a middle-grade novel but Feathered is much more sophisticated than much pedestrian MG storytelling. The writing is brilliant, demonstrating  much depth of spirit and story, taking Finch and the reader beyond the obvious and into the realm of optimism and possibilities, where even a little girl can see that she has it in her to soar above the commonplace and anticipate greatness of action and virtue.  Just like Terry Fox, Finch learns to recognize that the will to try is within her and she may or may not succeed, but there’s always the promise that comes with dreaming.

Flannery

by Lisa Moore

Groundwood Books

978-1-55498-076-5

268 pp.

Ages 13+

May 2016

Reviewed from advance reading copy

Oh, Flannery Malone. Flannery, Flannery, Flannery.  You are one of a kind. From your conceptual-artist, parenting-blogger mother, to the father you’ve never met, cherubic-x-devilish half-brother Felix and poor but rich life in St. John’s, Newfoundland, I’m, as they say, delighted to meet you but wouldn’t want to be you.  Actually, for that matter, I wouldn’t want to be a sixteen-year-old girl again and maybe that’s what I don’t envy about you, but you are unstoppable–in a good way– and a delight and your readers should be grateful to Lisa Moore for introducing you to us.

Boys are becoming an issue for Flannery.  Well, one boy in particular: Tyrone O’Rourke.  Though they’d been the closest of friends as kids before he’d moved away when his mom married his step-dad Marty, Tyrone has morphed into a graffiti artist known as SprayPig, sought by the cops, and rarely attends high school.  Regardless, Flannery sees the whole package that is Tyrone, past and present, and she is seriously in love. When she is partnered with Tyrone for their Entrepreneurship class project, he suggests they make potions, just like they pretended to make as kids, marketing them as magic.  But, except for this suggestion, Tyrone is awol for all work on the project, and Flannery ends up conceiving, creating and packaging the four different love potions herself.

But while she is navigating her working and crushing relationship with Tyrone, Flannery’s best friend Amber seems to be steering herself away from Flannery and her competitive swimming and into an all-consuming first relationship with Gary Bowen, a classmate and lead singer of a band whose music video will be the source of their own Entrepreneurship project.  Though Amber is becoming brutally opinionated about Tyrone, Flannery tries to diplomatically warn her friend of Gary’s dark side.  But between first loves and parents as well as the trials of high school society, Flannery and Amber and Tyrone would seem to be going against the current and where they end up may not be up to them.

“So love is work and it’s always changing and it’s making and noticing and needing and giving and definite.  It’s definite.” (pg. 113)

Lisa Moore gets into the head and heart of a sixteen-year-old so effortlessly that it’s surprising that this is her first book of young adult fiction.  Of course, from her award-winning adult fiction–Caught (House of Anansi, 2013), February (House of Anansi, 2009) and Alligator (House of Anansi,  2005)–we know Lisa Moore flawlessly tackles issues of youth and relationships and recklessness head on, never wavering from the task of telling the story no matter how fragile the characters or precarious their situations. And her insight into the tenuous nature of…everything, is evident in Flannery’s outlook and beliefs.

"I had understood about evil. I had seen how it was ordinary and stupid and there was nothing magical or fairytale-like about it.
      It was just a grown-up taking his problems out on a kid. Because he could. Because nobody stopped him.” (pg. 103)

While Lisa Moore doesn’t make everything right by Flannery’s conclusion, she does create closure for most story lines and even a bit of hope–in a kiss– which, just as in life, is sometimes all you can expect.

"Not believing in something requires a lot of effort.  It is easier to believe.  Once I have accepted that something is true, I have a hard time losing faith in it." (pg. 104)

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I'm thrilled to announce that author Lisa Moore has graciously agreed to read at the Young Adult venue of this year's Eden Mills Writers' Festival on September 18, 2016.  Other YA authors attending include R. J. Anderson, Lena Coakley, Douglas Davey, E. K. Johnston, Sylvia McNicoll, Liane Shaw and Amanda West Lewis, Check back to CanLit for LittleCanadians for a full list of guest authors in the YA and children's venues and for more details.