The Blue Camaro

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.

MacIntyre’s second young-adult title, a collection of 11 short stories
that predominantly feature adolescent male characters and that explore
many aspects of the adolescent condition, offers much good reading to
junior- and senior-high students. Only one of the stories, “The
Rink,” has been previously published (as part of The Blue Jean
Collection); this moving story won the 1993 Vicky Metcalf Short Story
Award. The mood of the stories tends to be sombre, yet hopeful, as in
the bittersweet “Golfing with Mr. Death,” which finds the central
character achieving his best-ever round of golf while also experiencing
an encounter with death. But there is also the macabre humor of “The
Rabbit,” in which a family dog is euthanized for a “crime” it did
not commit.

Character revelation is a significant part of each story, and readers
meet a wide variety of central characters, both unusual and
recognizable. For example, 17-year-old Dylan in “Shadow Dark Night”
is a hospitalized quadriplegic who is in this state because he elected
to play Russian roulette with three of his friends, and 15-year-old
Kenny Martin in “Doing Something” is undergoing the confusing,
driving emotions of first love. Though each of the book’s stories
stands alone as a separate read, two story pairs are interconnected via
common characters. But the physical separation of these stories in the
book may unfortunately cause these relationships to be overlooked.
Highly recommended.