Big White Knuckles.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

“Write what you know,” goes the adage, and Brian Tucker walks the walk in this novel set in a Cape Breton coal-mining town. Young Dagan Cadden’s future seems mapped out for him: quitting school and going down the mineshafts, following the path of his dad and uncles. Dagan’s aspirations reach higher, however, when he begins to appreciate the artistic flair he seems to have developed. His hard-working, long-suffering mother sees this skill and does what she can to nurture it, as does his school principal. Tucker’s attempts to separate his hero from his Cape Breton background are not always successful, since Dagan tries continually to emulate his “da” and his uncles. Tucker also adds a bit of homosexuality to the mix, when Dagan’s best friend turns out to be gay. Tucker chooses to write in the first person, and his prose gallops along without much of a rhythm for most of the book. Dagan moves from one adolescent act to another, driven less by personal conviction than by peer pressure. The profanity-laced dialect with which Tucker tells his tale becomes all too predictable, quickly losing whatever strength it might have had. And so the fighting and the drinking and the misogynistic womanizing all begin to lack definition. Tucker has some interesting concepts in this first novel. His pace is quick, and some of his characters ring true.