- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Coach House Books; 1 edition (Oct 15 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1552451577
- ISBN-13: 978-1552451571
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 13.7 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 358 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #517,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
This is a first novel through and through, with moments of brilliance and insight followed by moments of drivel that read like rejects from Creative Writing 101. There are few less interesting characters than 11-year-old boys. Jacob lives with his father. He had a twin brother who died in an accident, and a mom who has moved across the continent and remarried. Jacob and his father run, with the father always pushing him to more exertion and better times. Jacob does learn to run and wins some competitions, which increases his self-esteem. This is what the book should have been about, but the running disappears in the latter pages, introducing a new conflict, that of his father dating the mother of one of Jacob’s friends. The father-son relationship is complicated, and, for the most part, it works really well in the novel. What doesn’t work is the stupid antics of 11-year-olds at school where one boy is a bully and another weak physically. It is just not interesting, and neither is the long chapter about boys running about on Halloween. The cover is about as grey and depressing as can be and isn’t likely to attract readers.
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Book Description
Time you had a haricut. Look like a mop.
Not that skinny.
Skin and bloody bone, boy.
Jacob breaks the point of his pencil but makes it look like an accident. And away Dad goes out the door and thump thump down the stairs.
Jacob eyes the hole at the end of his pencil. Listens till he can’t hear the Torino anymore. Crawls under the covers. Hopes the rest of December comes and goes like a heartbeat.
Eleven-year-old Jacob McKnight doesn’t like running. He doesn’t like the hills, the cold wind, the slushy electrolyte drinks, the interval training. He doesn’t like the way his dad is always pushing him: harder, faster, what’s wrong with you, boy? But mostly he doesn’t like the way it gives him time to think about the accident that shattered his brother’s body and his parents’ marriage.
Jacob would rather be drawing than running. He likes the Anatomy Colouring Book his dad gave him, and he likes how it helps him to better draw superheroes, with their unbreakable bodies. He likes, too, how drawing makes him forget about how much he misses his mum, about how hard his dad works to pay for their tiny apartment and secondhand clothes, about the pitying whispers that follow them around Glanisberg.
Down Sterling Road parses the anatomy of childhood with wisdom, wit and wonder; it’s one of the most charismatic books you’ll read all year.
‘Down Sterling Road lopes into the periscope of Canadian literature, strides through the barking back alleys of small-town childhood, drifts like a leaf over the skin of memory. Adrian Michael Kelly has captured the bittersweet ache of growing pains and growing up, of adolescent loss and daydream and rage. This dazzling bildungsroman fractures paternity and anatomy and necromancy to become an exquisite marathon of filial love and acceptance.’ – Aritha van Herk
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