Nothing but Life
Author: Brent van Staalduinen
Publisher: Dundurn Press
During a sweltering summer, Dills must come to terms with a horrific crime and the parent he loves who committed it.
Dills and his mom have returned to Hamilton, her hometown, hoping to leave the horrors of Windsor behind. But it’s impossible to escape the echoes of tragedy, and trouble always follows trouble.
When Dills hurts a new classmate, it comes out in court that he was in the Windsor High library when the shooter came in. But he won’t talk about what he saw, what he still sees whenever he closes his eyes. He can’t. He definitely can’t tell anyone that the Windsor Shooter is his stepfather, Jesse, that Jesse can speak into his mind from hundreds of kilometres away, and that Dills still loves him even though he committed an unspeakable crime.
This book is heavy. Totally recommended, but not light reading. It beautifully, authentically captures the tortured soul of Dills, and the upended-ness of his family. Its cast of characters is diverse in every sense, utterly entertaining and fascinating. They certainly don’t fit together comfortably. There’s tension, anxiety, emotion, stubbornness, determination and tangled attempts at communication, along with occasional dollops of humor. There’s romance in a very sobering, tender manner. And there’s an oversupply of subplots, but they somehow work. The climax is both surprising and satisfying in an unsettling way. It ends gently, and with hope.
In short, this was a very challenging and all too topical subject to research and write. For the creator, the characters’ roller-coaster emotions must have been a minefield to negotiate. It took a gutsy writer to tackle the heart-breaking topic, and a skilled one to pull it off.
-P.W.