Breath of the Dragon

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.

For Krisjana (aka Kris) Anderson, summer holidays always mean going to
the family cottage at Matlock Beach on Manitoba’s Lake Winnipeg. This
year is different, however, because Kris, almost 16, becomes caught
between the competing emotional demands of two significant males. The
first is Kris’s artist father whose May heart attack has altered many
aspects of the family’s lifestyle. The other “man” in Kris’s
life is Ted Brighton, a 19-year-old babe magnet from the next-door
cottage.

As the novel opens in mid-July, Kris’s father has another
“episode,” which takes him and Kris’s mother and seven-year-old
brother, Ian, back to Winnipeg, while Kris remains alone at the cottage
awaiting the arrival of her 21-year-old half-brother, Myles. Kris,
nicknamed “babykins” by Ted because she’s the youngest of the lake
girls, hopes her newly developed figure will catch Ted’s eye. The more
worldly Ted definitely becomes interested, and over the next month, he
introduces Kris to alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, skinny dipping, and
all-but-intercourse sex.

In addition to accurately re-creating the summer romance beach setting,
Perrault captures the vacillating emotions of an adolescent girl—one
moment angry at her father because his illness interrupts her social
life and then immediately guilt-ridden for being selfish. Although Kris
shares the reader’s recognition that egocentric Ted is all wrong for
her, she continues to rationalize his behaviours until he nearly rapes
her on her birthday. In the same fashion that the fire in Kris’s
father’s Raku kiln—the breath of a dragon—transforms things,
Kris’s route to adulthood passes through the flames of adolescence.
Recommended.