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    Middle Row
    Middle Row
    Middle Row
    Ebook80 pages35 minutes

    Middle Row

    By Sylvia Olsen

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Things have changed since Raedawn and Vince started going out and the racial boundaries in town have slipped a bit. But when Dune, who never took sides, disappears, Raedawn is determined to find out where he has gone—or what happened to him. Fighting against ignorance and hate, they track Dune down and find he is in more trouble than they thought and that nothing is black and white.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOrca Book Publishers
    Release dateMar 1, 2008
    ISBN9781554696727
    Middle Row
    Author

    Sylvia Olsen

    Sylvia Olsen is an award-winning author of many books, including young adult novels, first readers, picture books, history and personal-essay. She also writes about knitting and designs knitting patterns. Sylvia teaches First Nations housing management at Vancouver Island University and works toward creating new housing opportunities on reserves in Canada. Sylvia lives in North Saanich, British Columbia on W̱SÁNEĆ territory.

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    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Vince and Raedawn investigate what happened to a missing classmate in a racially divided town. Middle Row tries to tackle us/them mentalities as well as a separation of “the other” within a community. This is no easy feat to accomplish in about one hundred pages at a reading level of 2.4. As an Orca Soundings novel, this book is packaged as a high-action contemporary young adult mystery but reads in a simplistic and sometimes stilted manner. Olsen attempts to convey complicated relationships and feelings with a few simple words or carried by straightforward dialogue. Each character has various traits and relationships to others drawn out, but they are not fully developed or expanded upon due to length and syntax restrictions. Also, the text uses some Canadian dialect, which may initially throw off an American reading audience who may not be familiar with certain terms. This is a very specifically hi-lo styled novel and as such, is only recommended to the specific audience of reluctant readers ages twelve to fifteen with the targeted reading level.

    Book preview

    Middle Row - Sylvia Olsen

    ago.

    Chapter One

    The bus pulls over for the kids from the reserve in front of Ruby’s convenience store. Raedawn jumps on in front of the others. She hurries down the aisle and drops into the seat beside me. She’s excited and out of breath as if she’s in a hurry to sit on the bus for the boring forty-five-minute ride to school. She drags her backpack up onto her lap.

    Wait till you see what Mom bought me on the weekend, she says, unzipping the bag. You won’t believe it.

    She tugs on something from inside until a new soccer boot springs free.

    Look at this baby.

    She holds the boot in front of my face until I laugh.

    What’s so funny?

    That can’t possibly fit your foot, I say. My feet haven’t been that small since I was in grade one.

    She takes a swing at me.

    She says, Doesn’t mean I’m not fast. Her eyes light up. I got the treads. I got the gear. And I’m going to be the starting center this year. I am. I am. I am.

    I believe you. I believe you. I believe you, I say, mimicking her.

    We’re going to be the city champs. She punches the air.

    I put my ankle on my knee. She does the same. We press the soles of our feet together. Her foot is almost exactly half as long as mine. But then they don’t call me Mr. Hoops for nothing. The last shoes I bought were size thirteen.

    You got monster feet. She laughs. They’re too big to play soccer. You’d trip over them.

    Oh yeah? When was the last time you saw me trip over my feet playing basketball?

    She thinks. Okay. Never, I guess. But no one in the whole world could possibly need a pair of feet that big.

    She starts talking about random stuff. Twenty minutes later we get to the hairpin turn. Raedawn stops talking in mid-sentence. The bus rumbles around the corner and over the bridge. It hums along the straight stretch, tires swishing on the wet pavement past the place where Dune usually waits. On a normal day the bus would have pulled over on the gravel shoulder and groaned to a stop. Dune would have hopped on. He would have walked down the aisle, nodding at some of the kids at the front of the bus without looking straight at anyone. He’d have gone to the middle row—the same place he’s sat since as far back as I can remember. The seat everyone leaves empty for him.

    Not this morning.

    Raedawn stays quiet until Dune’s stop is out of sight.

    Vince, she says. She twists around and looks out the back window as if she’s going to see him running behind. Dune hasn’t been at school since the first day. This is the tenth day. Don’t you think that’s strange?

    Not really. His mom probably got sick of living in the bush and moved away.

    He’s lived out here as long as you have lived in town. Wouldn’t it be kind of weird if your family just got tired of it and moved away?

    I guess so.

    Yeah, well my family wouldn’t just up and move off the reserve either. People around here don’t do that.

    I say, But Dune’s family is kind of messed up anyway, which is a huge understatement.

    I don’t know anything about his family really. Only that they live halfway between our town and the town where we go to school. It is a forty-five-minute drive from the edge of the Pacific Ocean to the west through clear-cuts and forest to the east. Past the school it takes another forty-five minutes to get to the city. So what I’m saying is that Dune lives in the middle of nowhere. And as far as I know, the only family Dune has is his mother.

    She’s another story—she looks like a hippie. She has long stringy blond hair and wears big skirts and work boots. Everyone says they live in a shack that she built herself. No one knows exactly where it is. It’s either down the hill by the beach or up the mountain somewhere in the forest. The only thing we know for sure is that they must live near the bridge where he waits for the school bus. Another thing about the place is that there’s no electricity, telephone, cable, no cell phone reception or even a driveway that you can see from the road.

    Dune’s got no friends at school that I know of. At lunch he’s either in the art room or hanging out on a bench in the hall doodling. He doesn’t talk to anyone. I’ve bumped into him and his mom at the grocery store in town a few times. They throw me an odd kind of smile and then look away like they’re worried I’m going to want to talk to them. No worries. I seriously doubt that’s going to happen any time soon.

    Raedawn says, Something’s wrong. She’s talking quietly. It doesn’t feel right.

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