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The F Team

by Anne Laurel Carter & Rose Cowles, illus.

Number Four, Bobby Orr

by Mike Leonetti, Shayne Letain, illus.

Heart of the Game: Minor Hockey Moments

by John Newby

Is hockey still at the heart of the Canadian psyche? Is it still our defining myth? It’s the kind of topic the CBC would turn into a rambling, multi-part documentary. Hockey’s a bigger business than it ever was, but fewer and fewer Canadian fans still see it as giving purpose to their very existence. The situation’s even worse with kids, many of whom weren’t even born when Patrick Roy left Montreal, never mind feeling nostalgic for “the original six.” The question of how kids relate to hockey is implicit in these three new picture books, though each is very different in tone and approach.

Of the three books, Number Four, Bobby Orr takes the most traditional approach. Ontario author Mike Leonetti’s story of player worship falls squarely within the tradition of The Hockey Sweater, perhaps not surprisingly for the author of The Greatest Goal (about the 1972 Canada-Russia series) and My Leafs Sweater. The story is narrated by a kid named Joey who plays defence, just like his favourite player, Bobby Orr. It is 1970, and Orr, who is leading the NHL in points (unprecedented for a defenceman), is about to win the Stanley Cup for the Boston Bruins – their first in 29 years. Joey trips and breaks his leg trying to score, and ends up in hospital, where he is visited by Orr himself, who tells him not to worry about the leg (Orr played on wrecked knees) and to concentrate on his skating. In the deciding game of the Stanley Cup series, which Joey watches with his dad, Orr scores the winner in overtime, famously tripping over another player’s stick as the goal goes in.

Joey’s narration is earnest and artless: “The Bruins had won the Stanley Cup! My hero had done it!” Leonetti’s book is as sincere and ingenuous as its narrator. His aim is obviously to introduce a new generation to one of hockey’s essential stories and thereby instill some sense of the game’s deeper myth. He mostly succeeds in this, but at the price of making the story too earnest and polite, making it a hard sell for children’s imaginations. Aside from the figure of Orr himself, Leonetti’s story lacks many of the particular cultural details and tensions that could have brought the book to life. Similarly, B.C. illustrator Shayne Letain’s drawings are competent and colourful, but a bit bland (wide eyes and straight, white teeth are the norm). Everyone here is just too darned nice.

John Newby’s Heart of the Game takes a more straightforward documentary approach. The book is not a story, but rather a prose poem about minor hockey. The text is set alongside large, astonishingly detailed paintings of children getting their gear on, playing shinny on a lake or in a community rink, and fumbling along in actual games. Outsized heroes like Orr are absent here: the focus is on the culture of the game itself, and especially the necessity for team play, with its emphasis on endless practising, respecting the refs and coaches, and quietly enduring the bad plays, bad calls, and bad games. The book is much more successful at evoking hockey’s particular ethos of self-sacrifice and self-control. Newby’s paintings, really the point of the book, are nearly photographic. His subjects are iconic, but he fills the pictures with enough detail to avoid outright cliché. He includes a short glossary, which is serviceable, but odd in its choices: “rules,” “skill,” and “victory” are defined, but not “offside,” “overtime,” or “period.”

Heart of the Game is a more beautiful, touching, and specifically hockey-centric book, but The F Team takes the most irreverent approach to the game. Toronto author Anne Laurel Carter’s tale of triumphing misfits, told in rhyming couplets, is the most fun. Pink-haired Fanny and her friends – Frenchie, Frieda, and Flip – try out for the town’s A team, but are rebuffed by “big and mean” boys who send them off the ice: “‘The A’s are A for Awesome. You guys are F’s,’ they said./ They snickered as they walked away, we knew our dream was dead.” To retaliate, Fanny puts her friends in figure skates and teaches them some fancy moves to compensate for their lack of size and strength. They play the A team and, of course, double-axel and dance their way to victory. Carter’s story moves at a brisk pace, and her rhymes and rhythms show a vibrant wit. Rose Cowles’s almost sketch-like illustrations take their cue from the goofy tone of Carter’s story – Fanny and friends are drawn broadly, the hockey scenes are anarchic, with the game’s spectators a scribbled mess in the background and little patterned snowflakes falling everywhere. Carter’s is the most lightweight of these three hockey books, but it’s noteworthy for taking the approach that the game’s culture, for all its tradition and iconography, need not be a closed one.

 

Reviewer: Nathan Whitlock

Publisher: Orca Book Publishers

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 32 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55143-241-2

Issue Date: 2003-9

Categories: Picture Books

Age Range: ages 4-8

Reviewer: Nathan Whitlock

Publisher: Raincoast Books

DETAILS

Price: $21.95

Page Count: 32 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55192-551-6

Released:

Issue Date: September 1, 2003

Categories: Picture Books

Age Range: ages 5-10

Reviewer: Nathan Whitlock

Publisher: McArthur & Company

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 32 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55278-395-2

Released:

Issue Date: September 1, 2003

Categories: Picture Books

Age Range: all ages