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  • Three Songs for Courage
  • Karen Coats
Trottier, Maxine Three Songs for Courage. Tundra, 2006324p ISBN 0-88776-745-1$16.95 Ad Gr. 9-12

It's 1956 in Erie View, Ontario, and life is getting complicated for sixteen-year-old Gordon Westley and his three best friends who call themselves the Lakers; they've got an escalating rivalry with the Sultans, a group of older boys headed by Lancer Caldwell, who has a particular dislike for the privileged Gordon and a particular longing for Gordon's girl, Mary. Lancer continually menaces and openly threatens Gordon and Mary, but things turn really dark when Lancer kills first the Westley family pet (a fact that nobody but he knows), and then Gordon's little brother, Stan (a death that appears to be an accident, and only Gordon knows was murder). Gordon vows to kill Lancer, but when he confides his plan to Injun Joely, a World War II veteran who has a fatherly affection for Gordon, Joely shares with him his own experience of being a sniper in the war and questions if Gordon is really prepared to live with the memory of his violence. The genuinely evil character of Lancer and the suspenseful plot save the book from collapsing under the weight of its own nostalgia; a prologue that laments the changes Erie View has seen since Gordon's glory days and a romance plot that is lifted a little too directly from the soap-operaish muscle-car tragedy songs of the times drags at the narrative, while Gordon's naïveté about sex and masturbation will have modern readers giggling and rolling their eyes (did people ever really think that hair would grow on their palms?). The more serious griefs of the book—Stan's death and the less immediate but more enduring traumas of the men recovering from two World Wars—provide [End Page 519] a realistic counterpoint to the mostly overblown masculine melodrama. From the profusion of excretions to the genital humor to the raw emotionalism, this is decidedly a guy's romance, dead-on for those who take pleasure, guilty or otherwise, in that sort of thing.

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