The King of Jam Sandwiches
Author: Eric Walters
Publisher: Orca Book
Thirteen-year-old Robbie leads a double life. It's just Robbie and his dad, but no one knows that his dad isn't like most parents. Sometimes he wakes Robbie up in the middle of the night to talk about dying. Sometimes he just leaves without telling Robbie where he's going. Once when Robbie was younger, he was gone for more than a week. Robbie was terrified of being left alone but even more scared of telling anyone in case he was put into foster care. No one can know. Until one day when Robbie has to show the tough new girl, Harmony, around school. Their first meeting ends horribly and she punches Robbie in the face. But eventually they come to realize that they have a lot more in common than they thought. Can Robbie's new friend be trusted to keep his secret?
Eric Walters has written more than eighty books, and I’ve read more than a few of them, but I feel this may be his best, most powerful and most important contribution. It’s also definitely not just a middle-grade novel. It can and should reach high schoolers as well (and educators, and parents).
Not just so that students struggling with poverty and incompetent or abusive parents – and students who lack the confidence or encouragement to make something of themselves – can see themselves in a story. But so that students who share classes with individuals desperately trying to hide all that from their peers, might gain insight and discover empathy for how the other half lives.
Despite the challenges the two main characters face, they connect because their lives have forced them to become watchful, tough, distrustful and resourceful. Those are instincts that bring them together, along with a mutual need for support. They don’t connect easily or smoothly, especially given that they are opposite personalities, but that supplies the tension, humor and poignancy of the story. It also leads to complementary strengths and weaknesses, and therefore a knack for whoever’s up helping whoever’s down, in turns, and in a way through which they learn from one another, and the reader learns from them. It is based partly on the author’s life, which makes it all the more heart-wrenching and meaningful.
No spoilers here. Just an urge to read it. You’ll never take a jam sandwich – or comfortable, loving home – for granted again.
- P.W.