Theories of Relativity. Barbara Haworth-Attard. Toronto, ON: HarperCollins, 2003. 199 pp., pbk., $15.99. ISBN 0-00-639299-7. Subject Headings: Homless persons-Juvenile fiction. Street youth-Juvenile fiction. Grades 9 and up / Ages 14 and up. Review by Dave Jenkinson. **** /4 Reviewed from advance reading copy.

excerpt:

Jenna gets up to refill our coffee cups. I study the people in the shop. Some read newspapers; others stare into space, but not like the crazies at the library. These people have places, and people, and jobs to think about. I want to be one of them. I want to order a coffee, pay for it with money I didn’t bum, open a newspaper, and worry about my job or the government raising my taxes.

“So you don’t have a father at the moment.” Jenna sits and places a cup in front of me.

“I might by now.” I say. “There was this new guy she was interested in. Dan.” I’d only seen him a couple of times through the window when he’d come to pick her up for a date. She didn’t let him come to the house. Knew we’d scare him off. “So he might be living there, I don’t know.”

But he probably is. In my house. That was Mom’s plan. She’d attracted a man who had a steady job. On and on she went about how respectable he was, which means he’s probably a creep. Finally, she decided he should meet us kids. On my sixteenth birthday. Not that there was cake or balloons or presents.

Eight of Barbara Haworth-Attard’s previous nine books can be equally divided between the genres of fantasy and historical fiction while the ninth book, Buried Treasure, belongs to the category of contemporary YA fiction. It is to this last genre that Haworth-Attard powerfully returns in Theories of Relativity. Today’s reality is that some eighty percent of Canada’s population resides in urban areas. In the past, the theme of man/woman vs. the land may have found its expression in books like as Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, but now the “land” no longer just consists of Canada’s vast tracts of unpopulated wilderness. Instead, the new Canadian “wilds” are to be found within inner-cities, and survival on that turf demands a whole new set of skills.

     Dylan Wallace, the eldest of three children, all fathered by different men, characterizes himself as “a throwaway” for his mother threw him out of the house on his sixteenth birthday when she recognized that his mouthy presence might interfere with her plans to snag a real husband (see excerpt above). When readers first meet Dylan, it is November, and he’s been on the streets for three weeks and has established his begging station just outside a large office building. His panhandling neighbor is the attractive Jenna, a very recent runaway who claims to be almost 16 but who is, readers later learn, only 14 and the victim of her father’s sexual abuse. Dylan has already acquired enough street smarts to know that there are many who will prey on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of street kids, and so far he has managed to stay out of their clutches, especially one such individual, Brendan, whom Dylan has nicknamed the Vulture. Brendan “runs” the panhandling street kids, initially providing them “protection,” shelter, food, clothes and drugs. Under the Vulture’s tutelage, some of these teens/early adults “graduate” to selling drugs or becoming prostitutes. Unfortunately, Jenna, who has been living on the street for less than a week, has already become one of Brendan’s bits of “property,” and Dylan fears that she will end up being required to prostitute herself.

     Other than occasionally being with Jenna, Dylan’s only brief moments of happiness are found in his warm recollections of his early childhood years when he lived with his paternal grandparents on a farm and in his satisfying memories of parenting his younger brothers, Jordan, 10, and Micha, six. While Theories of Relativity ends on the second day of a new year with the possibility of Dylan’s achieving a better future, this bit of hope does not arrive before he has suffered even more pain and disappointment than that which life had already provided him. Dylan’s place in his brothers’ lives, he believes, has been usurped by their new stepfather, and when Dylan makes a Christmas Eve bus trip to his grandfather’s farm, he finds his now widowed grandfather in a seniors home where he is unconscious and dying from cancer. Not only has Jenna been turned out on the streets as a hooker named Jewel, but she betrays Dylan by hooking him on Brendan-supplied painkillers after the Vulture’s goons have beaten Dylan up and broken some of his ribs.

     Hawarth-Attard’s recreation of life on the street is both believable and absolutely uncompromising. Readers will become caught up in the daily grind of trying to get enough money to buy some fast food, and as the days get colder, of being able to find a safe, warm place to coop for the night. Hawarth-Attard provides a strong cast of secondary characters including Amber, one of the Vulture’s hookers, who has been cut loose because she is so pregnant she can no longer turn tricks. The multiply-pierced Twitch, who is 18 and has been on the streets for four years after escaping a stepfather who used to burn his arm with cigarettes, is prepared to offer drug-dulled sex in exchange for a warm place to sleep. Garbage Man is a “dumpster diver - a person who gets his meals out of the trash bins behind restaurants.” Swear Lady has all of her belongings stacked in a shopping cart “that she guards with her life,” and, “as she walks, she litters the air with shouted obscenities.” Hawarth-Attard also shows how difficult it is for someone to extricate her/himself from this life once s/he becomes part of it. Even if some of these people want to get a “real” job, their unkempt appearance causes them not to be considered seriously. While Ainsley, a former street person who now works at a youth centre, and Glen, a well-to-do business man who supports an alternative school for street kids, try to help Dylan, Hawarth-Attard clearly shows that Dylan, a person of many theories, including his own theory of relativity - “relatives all suck” - must truly want to help himself before the help of others will be effective.

     Definitely a title for those who have enjoyed other “street” books such as Lesley Choyce’s Dark End of Dream Street or Don Aker’s The First Stone.

Highly Recommended.

Dave Jenkinson teaches courses in YA literature at the Faculty of Education, the University of Manitoba.

To comment on this title or this review, send mail to cm@umanitoba.ca.

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Published by The Manitoba Library Association ISSN 1201-9364

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