This book took place mostly in the undergrounders an abandoned shopping mall in a large city that houses many homeless kids who pay 50 cent a night to spend a day there. The main character is Jonathon a 12 year old boy who was a hockey player until his mom died, after he was then forced to live on the streets. Also, though Skuy ultimately offers up a storybook ending, the grittier aspects of Undergrounders may well give young readers pause to consider what life must be like for the innumerable homeless children of the world.My Book is a sport book called "UnderGrounders" by David Skuy. While the pat message about the value of sports is a touch overplayed here, the novel’s real strength comes from Mouse’s experience of the world as a fearful and dangerous place.
And it is implicit that, even though he is unaware of it himself, what he really needs is a route back to normalcy. That said, the book’s episodic structure provides enough daily strife that the tension rarely lags.
Seeing how good he is, they enlist him to play for their AA team, and the rest of the novel has Mouse struggling to negotiate his double life.īecause Skuy has not given Mouse a larger main objective, the story lacks drive.
When a chance opportunity allows him to steal some skates, a stick, and a puck, he heads for the local rink, where he is befriended by some boys playing shinny. Mouse, whose real name is Jonathan, also has a talent for hockey. Mouse’s days are spent panhandling, shoplifting, scrounging the city for food, and avoiding – not always successfully – a rival and brutal group of kids called Streeters. This sensitively written and compelling book tells the story of Mouse, an orphaned 12-year-old boy living in the fictional city of Brentwood.Īfter his mother dies of cancer, and with no other relatives to turn to, Mouse falls in with a rag-tag band of Dickensian street kids who call themselves Undergrounders because they sleep in an abandoned subterranean shopping mall. David Skuy, author of the popular trilogy of Charlie Joyce hockey novels, returns to Canada’s national winter sport with his first stand-alone novel.
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