Stranger at Bay

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.

Don Aker’s second young-adult novel revisits the themes of family
conflict and physical violence that were explored in Of Things Not Seen.

The new school year finds Randy Forsythe, 14, reluctantly attending
Brookdale Composite High School in Nova Scotia. As a result of corporate
downsizing, Randy’s father has been obliged to accept a pharmaceutical
sales position and to move his son and new wife, Norma, into a
ramshackle house on the Bay of Fundy. Resentful of his stepmother and
angry at his father for disrupting his comfortable life, Randy becomes
obnoxious at home. At school, his friendship with bright, attractive
Natalie McCormick brings admittance into her social circle.
Unfortunately, at its centre is Jake Varner, Natalie’s self-appointed
muscular boyfriend and leader of a quartet of school bullies. When Mr.
Hensford, one of Randy’s teachers, publicly humiliates him in class,
the Jake-led group decides to even the score by spreading cow excrement
over Hensford’s home. In a believable fashion, Aker has Randy arrive
at appropriate decisions regarding his relationships at home and at
school.

A teacher in Middleton, Nova Scotia, Aker writes with authority about
the school milieu. As Robert Cormier did in The Chocolate War, Aker
reveals that schools, ostensibly places of learning and enlightenment,
can have a nasty darker side; some students, especially the academically
bright, small, weak, or physically unattractive, find themselves
victimized and/or excluded from the social mainstream. Recommended.