As the coming-of-age story of a sixteen-year-old Native kid, Jared Martin, this book explores all the familiar anxieties faced by high school kids everywhere (social acceptance, family expectations, drug and sexual experimentation), layers on the less familiar anxieties particular to his situation (his mom's a violent hothead who exposes her son to a series of psycho boyfriends while denying Jared access to the substance-abusing father who desperately needs his son to help pay rent for him and his new family), and then further layers on the totally unfamiliar anxieties of a kid who is experiencing the thinning of the barriers between this world and that inhabited by his people's traditional bogeymen. You have to be harder.Īuthor Eden Robinson calls Son of a Trickster “a cognitive screwball gothic with working class people”, and that's too precisely perfect a description for me not to just quote her. Mind you, ravens speak to him-even when he's not stoned. And he puzzles over why his maternal grandmother has never liked him, why she says he's the son of a trickster, that he isn't human. 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. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
