Children have a car, mission and each other
The best thing about light summer reading is encountering a set of characters with whom you’d like to hang out in real life. The kids in Look Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts, for example.
They lead the kind of life that, to some, might seem deprived. Virtual orphans, they have what could charitably be called truly terrible parents. Luckily (or sadly, depending on your point of view), those parents are rarely in the picture. For the most part, the four kids — Kim and Kimo, both 11, Pippa, 8, and Toby, 5 — fend for themselves.
Growing up on a tropical island, they share somewhat complicated family ties. Three of the four have the same father: Dr. Fitzgerald, a scientist who studies pygmy possums and basically abandons his offspring to pursue the possums when they’re spotted on a different island. The fourth, Kimo, is the son of Johnny Trout, who went missing at sea when Kimo was small.
The girls share a mother (Maya, interested only in lining her own pockets, who gets jailed for her role as stockbroker in a billiondollar scheme to defraud investors) and the boys share a different mother (Tina, not as greedy as Maya, but terribly vain and interested only in appearances). At least Tina occasionally drops by to give the kids some money — more than the loose change Maya was grudgingly giving them before she landed in jail.
As for Dr. Fitzgerald, the one good thing he did for the kids before hightailing it out of their lives was to teach Kim to drive his little green car. She was only eight at the time, and because her feet could not yet reach the pedals, her father devised a set of driving shoes: his old high-top sneakers attached to big cans of stew. Kim — who, like her siblings, normally goes barefoot (they’re living on a tropical island, remember) — laces up the stew-can shoes whenever they want to take a trip around the island, avoiding the Sakahatchi Forest, which is rumoured to be home to bloodsucking iguanas.
Resourceful but homeless, the four children basically live in the car. While it keeps them dry in rainstorms, the shelter it offers is getting cramped as the kids grow in size. They need to find a house.
At first, Maya’s incarceration looked like the answer to their dreams, since her big, luxurious home would stand empty while she was in jail. But before the kids could move in, they discovered that the house and all its contents were being sold to pay some of Maya’s debts. Their only hope, it seems, is to explore the island and try to find a dwelling they can make their own. Courageously, they even venture into the dreaded Sakahatchi, where they survive an assault from the treedwelling iguanas; they emerge from the forest to find a grassy meadow that leads to a seemingly abandoned house near the edge of an oceanside cliff.
Author Esta Spalding, a screenwriter and poet with an intriguing family tree of her own (the daughter of Canadian novelist Linda Spalding, her stepfather is Michael Ondaatje), has done a masterful job of creating a set of memorable characters. Her first foray into middle-grade novels, this book is filled with lively dialogue, occasionally grumpy asides and plenty of humour. It benefits greatly from the illustrations by Sydney Smith, who soared to prominence in Canadian children’s literature with his work on JonArno Lawson’s picture book Sidewalk Flowers.
Do your kids a favour and introduce them to the FitzgeraldTrouts this summer.