Like a TV Hero

Dave Jenkinson is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Education at the
University of Manitoba.

Kris Higgins, an Edmonton Grade 6 student, wishes that he and the people
around him could and would behave more like characters on television. In
particular, Kris wants his taxi-driving father and waitress mother to
abandon their negligent parenting style and take on the caring behaviors
of TV-family parents. Kris remembers that awful time when social workers
removed him and his five-year-old sister Lisa from their home because of
a complaint. Although the family situation improved markedly during the
period that Gran came to live with them, her recent death has caused
Kris to become anxious. Kris now fears that his parents’ practice of
leaving Lisa alone while they go to work could lead social services to
take him and his sister into permanent custody. Kris, who imagines Gran
to be an angel now, frequently “talks” to her and asks her to
intercede in his life’s events.

Not all of Kris’s time is consumed with family worries. He and his
best friend, Alfie Como, are attempting to build a soapbox racer. The
pair’s search for wheels brings them into contact with Harold
“Garbage Harry” Connor, a “professional” trash-bin scavenger who
is being muscled out of his best “routes” by a couple of young
toughs. The soapbox-racer portion of the story introduces two further
characters: a girl, May Lee “Charley” Fong, and a woman, Anna, the
local corner-store owner whom Kris suspects of snitching to social
services. A soapbox derby, at which the toughs get their comeuppance and
Kris’s parents again “fail” him, concludes the book.

Bellingham’s strength lies in her character development, and readers
in grades 3 to 5 will enjoy watching Kris learn that “real life
isn’t like TV. There isn’t always a happy ending.”