Necking with Louise

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.

An enticing title leads junior- and senior-high readers into a superb
collection of seven connected short stories featuring 16-year-old Eric
Anderson whose family farms near the small community of Lashburg,
Saskatchewan. Through these stories of character, adolescent readers
share in a number of significant happenings occurring in Eric’s life
between Halloween, 1964, and September 21, 1965. On his first real date,
in “The Clodhopper’s Halloween Ball,” Eric both experiences and
questions the meaning of love. In “The Game,” Eric’s hockey team
plays the deciding game of the provincial championships. Eric is
involved in a struggle for survival in “Sun Dogs” when his horse
breaks a leg and the pair are caught in a prairie spring snowstorm. The
excitement of passionate “love” comes to the fore in the title
story, “Necking with Louise,” but fades in “The Summer I Read Gone
with the Wind” as a summer job takes Eric away from Louise and she
finds another with whom to share her exciting kisses. Death touches Eric
in the closing stories. In “The River,” he fails to rescue a young
man attempting suicide, while “Saying Good-Bye to the Tall Man”
finds him coping with his grandfather’s death.

The author effectively captures rural prairie life, and despite the
many references to songs and events of the 1960s, his book has relevance
for today’s teens. The fact that plot elements are left unresolved in
many of the stories leaves one to hope that additional episodes of
Eric’s life will be forthcoming. Highly recommended.