Spud in Winter

Kelly L. Green is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual’s
Children’s Literature edition.

One exceptionally cold day, while he is leaning on his garage doors,
Spud Sweetgrass (his real name is John, but he obtained his unusual
sobriquet while working in a chip wagon during the summer) watches in
horror as a man leaving a coffee shop is gunned down by the passengers
of a brown panel van. Spud believes himself to be the only witness, and
he is thrown into a moral quandary by an unfortunate coincidence: he can
identify the driver (a hair-obsessed client of his hairdressing friend
Connie Pan) and fears that if the driver saw him and recognized him as
Connie’s friend, both he and Connie might be in danger. Spud calls
911, but he does not tell the police everything he knows. The rest of
the book follows Spud, Connie, and Spud’s friend Dink through their
efforts to locate Connie’s client, B. Faroni (say it out loud), and
turn him over to the police.

Spud in Winter is a readable, fairly entertaining mystery, and Spud is
a likable narrator. The well-drawn characters are perhaps the best
aspect of the book. The plot, however, is weak, and the mystery holds
few surprises (we know from the beginning who the perpetrator is and
what Spud’s troubles are). Some 100 of the book’s 140 pages are
ploddingly devoted to Spud’s angst about whether or not to tell the
police what he knows, resulting finally in his decision to involve both
them and his family and friends in his situation. The last part of the
book moves along at a fair clip, with a number of coincidences that
stretch the reader’s power to suspend disbelief, but that nevertheless
make for a more entertaining read. Written for young adults, the book is
obviously meant to be funny, but incidents that the author seems to
intend as Shakespearean comic relief come across rather as examples of
clunky toilet humor that add nothing to the story and render the book
inappropriate for younger children with advanced reading ability.
Recommended with reservations.