Sketches.

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.

In Sketches, Walters returns to a theme found in Shattered: street people. An opening Author’s Note explains that the book’s title acknowledges Sketch, a Toronto drop-in centre where street youth can express themselves through art. While the book’s characters are fictional, Walters asserts that the situations in which they find themselves are real.

Some three weeks ago, Dana McKinnon, almost 15, had run away from her rural, middle-class Ontario home and now survives by panhandling on Toronto’s summer streets. Fortunately for Dana, two older street-wise adolescents, Brent and Ashley, befriended her, and they have created a mutually supportive street family. Lest teen readers think that life on the streets, free of parental control, is romantic, Walters graphically portrays the teens’ daily realities of having to make enough money for food while securing a safe place to sleep, all the time trying to avoid becoming victims of violence and sexual exploitation, things the trio are not entirely successful in doing. The adolescent threesome eventually achieve their biggest challenge, finding a way to escape the street, via Dana’s involvement in Sketches.

Walters also explores why teens first become street kids, with dysfunctional families of various types apparently being root causes. Brent’s religious parents could not accept his sexual orientation, while Ashley preferred street life to a series of foster homes. Mysterious, Dana’s reason is not revealed until the book’s end, but astute readers should be able to ascertain her motivation by connecting her expressions of intense dislike for her stepfather with her history of self-mutilation. Recommended.