Shattered [Mass Market Paperback]

Walters’ novel, Shattered, includes a variety of life-changing experiences. The primary protagonists in the book are fifteen-year-old grade ten student, Ian, a middle-aged ex-military “Sarge”, aka “Jack” or “Jacques”, and an older soup kitchen manager, Mac. Ian, like Will in We All Fall Down, comes from a well-to-do family but has the baggage of feeling alienated from his parents, especially from his overly-busy father whom he seldom saw. His parents worked, and it was his Guatemalan nanny who raised him. Ian, like Will, is now on a school assignment in the community. He is to work as a “volunteer” at “the Club”, a soup kitchen run by a gruff, plain speaking ex-alcoholic named Mac. The Club’s site is in Shelby Park, also home-base for the tent city where Sarge, a troubled military peacekeeping veteran squirrels out, nursing his bottles of booze and remembering demons of the Rwandan genocide. The three come together when Sarge rescues Ian from teenage muggers in the Park as he heads to his first shift at the Club. Under Mac’s tutelage, Ian soon learns about the kitchen’s patrons, including Sarge, and the social discrimination and personal hardships they’ve faced. He’s also told firmly, “You’re not here to judge ‘em or save ‘em, just serve ‘em food.”
However, the closer Ian gets to Sarge and the more he understands him and his symptoms (which resemble those of Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, author of Shake Hands With the Devil), the more he’s determined to provide the alcoholic veteran, clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, with helpings of frank talks as well as servings of spaghetti and sauce. In their confrontational discussions about Sarge’s alcoholism, Ian learns about his friend’s peacekeeping time in Rwanda. He hears about the horrors of dead bodies stacked like cordwood, the rape and killing he witnessed, and the monumental failure on the part of world powers to stop it. He also learns that Sarge comes from Montreal; hence the name “Jacques” anglicized to “Jack.” Although both Lt. General Dallaire in his Foreword and Walters in an end note state that the story is not about Dallaire, they both acknowledge the many similarities between Sarge’s story and Dallaire’s and the realities of post-traumatic stress disorder and of the Rwandan genocide. For those reasons alone, Walters’s book should be read.
It’s worth reading as well for the other story lines and themes that Walters subtly incorporates into his book in his relaxed prose. There is, for instance, the realistic antagonism between Ian and his parents, an interesting sub-story about Guatemala’s “the Disappeared”, and the display of the prejudices many of Ian’s classmates show against the homeless, mentally afflicted and victims of substance abuse. And as always in Walters’s award-winning novels, there are scenes of teachers and students in their ongoing classroom conflicts.
Shattered holds a well-polished mirror up to one of the most horrific events of recent history. It is a mirror everyone should look at and reflect upon.
M. Wayne Cunningham (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.