Vehicles for Fun and Sports: Individual Title Six-Packs Book

This book is about as gritty as they come. It tells a rather convoluted story - largely owing to Robinson's decision to dispense with chronology for the sake of building suspense - of a couple trying to cut out the rot of their pasts after getting off drugs and cleaning up their acts. When you surrounded yourself with psychopathic drug-dealers and their thuggish 'friends', well, it is not so easy to start anew. Especially when the psychopathic drug-dealer is your cousin and, at times, showed you more care and concern than anyone else ever has. Or something.

Honestly, this book jumps around so much that you really need to have your inferencing cap on to sort out everything that is between the lines. I didn't always feel up to the task (uh, so what exactly did Jeremy do to Tom in the first go-round? And how did those bikers get involved anyway?), which was compounded by having long-ish gaps between my reading sessions.

Robinson has a gift for portraying people who haven't had a lot of opportunities and/or means in their lives in a way that shows their intelligence, resourcefulness, resilience and heart. She did this really well in Monkey Beach as well. I liked that book more than this one, but both show her compassion for the downtrodden equally well.

And, of course, I have to mention Robinson's choice of setting - Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. practically every Canadian knows about Vancouver's Eastside. It has been known as 'Canada's Poorest Postal Code' (although that honour now goes to Cape Breton's Eskasoni First Nation, with Winnipeg's inner city a close second. DTES is now 7th poorest). Its needle exchange, opened in 1989, was the first in North America. There are extremely high rates of HIV infection, homelessness and mental illness among its denizens. Not to mention violence and the sex trade. Anyway, it is a place that likely conjures up a lot of stereotypical images of places and people that one would give a wide berth to. But Robinson shows how community is built here, the little ways in which people living in a community get to know each other and recognize each other's humanity, no matter what the circumstances.

Overall, this is a book that doesn't sugar-coat how hard the everyday can be for people who never got a break in their life, and how making those seemingly minor decisions to try to ease the miseries can add up to a whole lot of crap on your head. Kind of brutal, non?