This sheen of science is useful, I guess, for those who might need convincing that ultradimensional beings are a natural feature of the universe (and not the easy-to-dismiss animism of so-called primitive religions), and I ate it up as simply interesting writing. Encoded memories so frayed you think they're extinct, but they wait, coiled and unblinking, in your blood and in your bones.Īs the membrane between our earthbound reality and that of Wee’git the Trickster begins to thin for Jared, there are brief interludes in the narrative in which some entity (later become manifest as a swarm of fireflies) attempts to explain magic and altered consciousness through quantum physics first to us the reader, and then to Jared himself. But come closer and let me speak to the creatures that swim in your ancient oceans, the old ones that sing to you in your dreams. With all the power of technology and science in the world, I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that you still trust a human face to be a human. And not incidentally: the texting conversations between Jared and his mom (and a host of other characters) was probably the most believable use of this device I've ever read: why can't authors seem to get this right? Kudos to Robinson for knowing how and when to use texting. What works the best throughout this whole book is the believable decency of the main character, Jared – he is generous and empathetic and morally uncorrupted by the chaos around him – and his relationship with his mother: I laughed frequently at the verbal sparring between these two and their closeness radiated from the page. I don't always have a lot of patience for magical realism, but this read like classic Stephen King and was absolutely terrifying. 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.
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