He regularly helps his elderly neighbours, Mr and Mrs Jaks, who took him in when Maggie was sent for a stint in rehab and anger management for power-nailing her abusive ex-boyfriend David’s arms to the floor. Eye for an eye, bill for a bill” figures into this equation, too.). Optics aside, Jared is fundamentally a sweet, responsible kid who gets the rent and bills paid when his dad blows his disability cheque on Ox圜ontin, or his mother Maggie and her drug-dealing boyfriend, Richie, disappear on “business” (Maggie’s “Biblical sense of justice. Jared funds his bad habits by baking and selling homemade pot cookies to the kids at his Kitimat high school, who show their appreciation by dubbing him “the Cookie Dude.” As in her novels Blood Sport and her Giller Prize-shortlisted Monkey Beach, Robinson’s hero, Jared Martin, is a substance-abusing BC teen from a dysfunctional family of enablers. Most (though not all) of the spewing is drug- and alcohol-induced. Mind you, ravens speak to him-even when he's not stoned.Chances are you won’t read a novel in 2017 with more vomiting in it than Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster, the first instalment in a planned trilogy by the Haisla/Heiltsuk writer who first rose to prominence in the ’90s with a visceral book of short stories, Traplines. And he puzzles over why his maternal grandmother has never liked him, why she says he's the son of a trickster, that he isn't human. But he struggles to keep everything afloat. Jared is only sixteen but feels like he is the one who must stabilize his family's life, even look out for his elderly neighbours.
He can't rely on his dad to pay the bills and support his new wife and step-daughter. Jared can't count on his mom to stay sober and stick around to take care of him.
Jared does smoke and drink too much, and he does make the best cookies in town, and his mom is a mess, but he's also a kid who has an immense capacity for compassion and an impulse to watch over people more than twice his age, and he can't rely on anyone for consistent love and support, except for his flatulent pit bull, Baby Killer (he calls her Baby)-and now she's dead. Everyone knows a guy like Jared: the burnout kid in high school who sells weed cookies and has a scary mom who's often wasted and wielding some kind of weapon.
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