A Perfect Gentle Knight.

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.

Award-winning Kit Pearson has crafted another engaging, character-driven novel which spans the period from September 1957 to November 1958, as a Vancouver family continues to struggle three years after their wife’s/mother’s accidental death. Sebastian (Seb) Bell, now 14, had played being Sir Lancelot as a young child, and his artist mother called him “her knight in shining armor.” Following her death, Seb enlists his five siblings in secretly role-playing Round Table, in which he and Roz, the eldest, are knights, the middle pair, Corrie and Harry, squires, and the six-year-old twins, Juliet and Orly, pages, with a backyard shed serving as Camelot. Their father, aka Fa, a Shakespearian professor consumed by writing a book, employs a series of daily housekeepers while absentmindedly leaving child raising to the two eldest. In the game, an unknowing Fa becomes King Arthur, a role that, by Seb’s logic, makes his deceased mother Guinevere. About the game, narrator Corrie, 11, comments, “Now it didn’t seem like a game any more—gradually it had taken over every part of their lives.” However, the children are maturing, and Roz, 13 and in junior high, wanting to be popular and have friends outside the family, quits the game, a behavior Seb sees as betrayal. Seb, while experiencing bullying by male classmates because of his long “knightly” hair, finds a girlfriend, Jennifer, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of Guinevere. However, when Jennifer dumps Seb for his arch-enemy, Terry, aka Mordred, Seb has a mental breakdown, an event which finally re-engages his father. Highly recommended.