Last Chance Summer

Al Stray is manager of the Port Credit Public Library.

Recipient of the 1986 Vicky Metcalf Award for best children’s short story, Wieler has written another winner. Perhaps drawing on her experience as a crisis centre volunteer, the Winnipeg native brings to life situations most children, it is to be hoped, will never face.

Written for a pre-teen audience, Last Chance Summer is set in the badlands of Alberta on the outskirts of Drumheller. As the story opens, rebellious 12 year-old Marl Silversides, the protagonist, has been picked up again by police. Shuffled from foster home to foster home, his history includes a stop at a provincial institution. Rather than go back there he reluctantly accepts his social worker’s alternative — the Jenner farm.

Marl joins nine other “misfits” at the ram-shackle rural group home. Being outcasts does not mean the teenagers are a homogeneous or closely knit group. Carl Jenner’s charges include the manipulative Len, Goat the loner, and the bitter Topo. Unfortunately Marl soon has a run-in with the latter who neither forgives nor forgets. Luckily at the same time he kindles something in Goat, which over the course of the 12 short chapters develops into friendship.

This is a story of one young survivor’s struggle to find hope and dignity in a world which usually proves hostile for the illiterate, and especially those who look different. Wieler concludes the story on a positive, satisfying note yet keeping within the bounds of what is plausible.