Hockey Night in Transcona

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Twelve-year-old Cody Powell from Transcona, a suburb of Winnipeg,
desperately wants to become a member of the Transcona Sharks, but hockey
registration and equipment costs are beyond the means of his
single-parent mother. Cody’s skills so impress the Sharks’ coach
that he arranges a subsidy. Now a Shark, Cody encounters a new problem
in the form of Stu Brackett, the first-line left-winger and the
coach’s son, who feels threatened by Cody’s hockey abilities.
Running throughout the book is a subplot involving Cody’s mixed
feelings about his father, who has remarried and relocated to Kamloops.
Though Cody has warm memories of his father, he feels betrayed and
refuses to communicate with him. By book’s end, Cody’s on- and
off-ice problems have been resolved in a generally believable fashion.

Young hockey fans will probably be more interested in Danakas’s
play-by-play descriptions of the Sharks’ practices and their two
pre-season games than in his depiction of the father–son relationship.
Recommended.