Winners

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

“Eleven foster homes in eight years, and moving again. It was enough to make him sick.” Jordy Threebears, 15 years old (and most of those years spent in trouble), thinks he knows all there is to know about foster homes — but this time is going to be different. This home is with his own scarcely-known maternal grandfather, Joe Speckledhawk, on the Ash Creek Reserve. Up until now Jordy has always been placed in non-Indian homes — “situations within the broader Canadian community.” This time home is really home.

His grandfather has just been released from prison, where he has stoically served his sentence for avenging the brutal slaying of his daughter, Jordy’s mother. Both the old man and the youngster have ample cause for bitterness; it has indeed seemed there is room for nothing else in either life. But now, for the first time, Joe has his grandson to care for, and there is something more than empty anger for Jordy as well. Joe (who doesn’t want to be called grandfather) has given the boy his own horse, an untamed prairie mare. She, like Jordy, must learn to accept a new, sometimes confining but ultimately rewarding new life. Together horse and boy can be Winners. A gruelling long-distance race offers them a chance to earn the proud name Siksika: Blackfoot. This satisfying story for young readers is an upbeat account of scarred lives made whole, and of pride reborn.