Porcupine.

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.

Oscar-nominated Meg Tilly, who once made characters come alive through her acting, now does so equally well via her words. The Coopers, a happy St. John’s, Newfoundland family, consisting of Jacqueline, 12, Tessa, 10, Simon, 7, and parents Bob and Fran, are devastated when soldier Bob is killed in Afghanistan. Jacqueline, Jack to her father, had shared a special connection with Bob, and she dreams that he tells her to take care of her siblings, something which becomes necessary after a profound depression incapacitates Fran. Finally reduced to poverty, Fran drives the children to the Alberta farm of their great-grandmother Doris Findlay, whom juvenile trio had never met, where she leaves them.

Fran and Doris have a “history.” Fran, orphaned at 12 and raised by Doris and her husband, now dead, had, against their wishes, eloped with Bob, an act that led to their 14-year estrangement. In Doris’s “My house, my rules!” environment, the children are expected to earn their keep by doing farm chores.

While Fran gets a job in nearby Calgary, she appears to have begun a new life, one that rarely includes her children. Consequently, Jack, recognizing Fran’s unreliability, resumes her surrogate mother’s role while maintaining a strained relationship with the curmudgeonly Doris. Of special concern to Jack is how Simon struggles at school, both academically and socially. Chronologically organized by seasons, Porcupine begins with autumn and concludes the next autumn while omitting the winter following Bob’s death. The meaning of the book’s unusual title only becomes clear in the final chapter. Highly recommended.