YA novels explore leaving home
The Agony of Bun O’Keefe Penguin Teen Canada Bun O’Keefe, 14, who feels she has no choice but to go after her mother, yells, “Get out!” in Smith’s second YA novel, set in 1986 Newfoundland.
Her obese mother has kept Bun virtually a prisoner since Bun’s father fled the chaos. Bun’s only links to the outside world are the VHS tapes and books she has used to home-school herself. She hitchhikes to St. John’s, where she meets Busker Boy, an Innu street musician, and his rooming housemates.
Smith’s dramedy shows how Bun’s new friends, like herself, have no choice but to work toward self-preservation.
Smith convincingly blends all sides of Bun, who can be as comically naive as Forrest Gump, and as appreciatively wondrous as Jack in Emma Donahue’s Room. Smith’s comic and poignant novel dramatizes how getting out and carrying on takes courage.
Munro takes his role as protective older brother of Evie, born with Down syndrome and a heart defect, with all-consuming seriousness. When she collapses and the CPR he performs can’t save her, he can’t forgive himself.
Groth, a former special education teacher, writes with compassion and humour. His characters are idiosyncratic and lively.
It is Groth’s deft evocation of Munro’s self-aware narration and the voices in his head that propels the novel.
The Mosaic Nina Berkhout Groundwood Books
On the first page of The Mosaic, narrator Twyla Jane Lee says her “only goal was to get out of Halo.” Twyla, the daughter of an alcoholic father and mother with artistic ambitions but no talent, aims to escape them and Halo, a dying farm community in Montana.
Twyla must fulfil communityservice duties to graduate from high school. She and boyfriend Billy are assigned to help Gabriel Finch, a marine with PTSD who toils in a decommissioned silo on his family’s farmland, where he is creating a mosaic of the ancient Iraq city of Uruk, a paradise he witnessed being lost to war.
The setting and premise, while rife with drama and significance, are underdeveloped, as are the book’s primary and secondary characters, and life in Halo in general.
Sherie Posesorski