When Mrs Jaks is diagnosed with cancer, he helps her out by looking after her husband, who has dementia, when she goes off for treatment. Yet Jared, who is caught between so many competing demands, is full of empathy for other people and cares deeply about them. It doesn’t help that his life is a constant battle to keep everyone happy: his fiercely outspoken mother his father who lives a long bus ride away his demanding step-sister and her new baby his “friends” at school the customers who buy his cannabis-infused cookies, which he bakes then sells to pay his dad’s rent and his elderly neighbours, the Jaks, who pay him to do yard work. He has one constant companion - a beloved dog - but when she dies he finds it difficult to come to terms with the loss.

Sometimes she and her new boyfriend, Richie, disappear for days at a time “on business” (read: “acquiring drugs”), leaving him to his own devices. His father has run off to be with another woman, his maternal grandmother hates him because she thinks he’s a trickster (“he’s wearing a human face, but he’s not human”) and his mother is combative, potty-mouthed and messed up on drugs.īy the time Jared is 16 he is living in the decrepit basement of his mother’s house, so that she can rent his room out to cover her bills. We learn very early on that Jared’s upbringing hasn’t been conventional. The subject matter might be bleak, but there’s so much compassion - and heart - in this book that it’s hard not to fall a little bit in love with it. I was a little reluctant to read Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster - shortlisted for the 2017 Giller Prize - probably because the author’s bio on the inside flap of the dust jacket was cringe inducing (“ Son of a Trickster was written under the influence of pan-friend tofu and nutritional yeast, which may explain things but probably doesn’t”) and expected the text inside to follow suit.īut this coming-of-age tale about Jared, an indigenous boy growing up with a drug-addicted mother, utterly charmed me. Fiction – hardcover Knopf Canada 336 pages 2017.ĭon’t you love it when you pick up a book and it takes you completely by surprise?

Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson