Runnerland.

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.

Burns paints a harsh word picture of life on the streets. For 14-year-old Peter Weir, November 1 began like every other school day, but his first class was interrupted by a call to the principal’s office, where his mother informed him that his father had just died from a heart attack. Four days after the funeral, looking for a place to hide the thousand dollars in cash his father had left him, Peter accidentally finds papers indicating he was adopted, information unknown to him. Unable to cope with this double emotional whammy, Peter runs away, boarding a bus taking him westward and eventually arriving in an unnamed island city, likely Victoria. Having spent some money on the bus ticket, with most of the rest stolen en route, Peter quickly finds himself living on the street, where he is befriended by an older teen, Dekman, who controls local panhandling. In return for a place to stay, food, and drugs, the street kids give Dekman their money. Dekman demands blind loyalty from “tribe” members, requiring them to undergo a ceremony in which, after renouncing their past lives, accepting the tribe as their new family, and selecting a new name, they are branded. Peter, now Runner, physically spends four months panhandling while living at Dekman’s squat, an abandoned house, but emotionally he spends a lot of that time in a white world in his mind, a place he labels Runnerland. At book’s end, Runner, once again Peter, is still in Victoria, but emotionally he appears to have begun his journey home. Recommended.