"Son of a Trickster" by Eden Robinson

Eden Robinson's best selling book, Son Of A Trickster, is an excellent read. It's very descriptive and intriguing. It definitely makes me want to keep reading. The main theme of this book is about aboriginal beliefs and how most people from aboriginal ancestry are portrayed through the eyes of white people. Although I believe that this book is an excellent read, I also believe that this book should have guidelines as to what age is appropriate to read this novel. This book is definitely not appropriate for all audiences for many different reasons and I believe that people need to be aware of this before reading or buying this book for someone of a younger age.

This book shows the main character, Jared Martins, going about his life, trying to support his family. He supports his recovering addict father and partly his hard-partying mother, who is either drunk, high, or hungover, with the money he earns from taking care of his elderly neighbors.

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He also runs a cookie business, but not any old cookies. They happen to be pot cookies. He makes a good profit off of them too, so much so that he has students at school threatening to kill him if he doesn't bring them cookies. Jared's home life is awful. His mother, who has a homicidal temper, likes to torture her boyfriends by stapling their arms to the floor when they threaten Jared. This book definitely doesn't cut corners when it comes to detail and description. Personally, I really enjoyed this book, but that's because I'm not easily affected when it comes to talk of drugs and alcohol.

A lot of people I know am and they wouldn't want to read this book if they knew how much drug and alcohol talk there is. This story does mention drugs and alcohol in the beginning of the book, but that's in the prologue and nobody that I know takes the time to read that. They go straight to the story part. If I were someone who is easily affected by drug and alcohol talk, especially if I was under 14, I would definitely want to know that there is that type of talk in the story before I read it.

This book has quite a lot of violence as well. From Jared's mother stapling her boyfriends arms to the ground when they threaten Jared to Jared’s friends explaining to him in detail what they would do to him if they didn't bring them pot cookies. This part of the story kind of irked me. I can't stand violence so it really disappointed me when I read the first little part of violence in the story. I knew that there was going to be a little bit of violence in some form, but I didn't realize that it was going to be so much and in such detail. For example, near the beginning of the story, Jared is waiting at his bus stop for the bus to arrive, when one of his mother's ex-boyfriends spots him from across the road and lets his dog loose at him. Just as the dog was about to attack Jared, his mother comes out of nowhere and runs the dog over with her car.

That part was very sad to me. I'm a huge animal lover, and even though the story is fiction, it was still very depressing to hear that somebody would run over a dog. I am a little bit of a sensitive person when it comes to violence. Every time I see a fight, even if it's on television, my anxiety levels shoot up. I want to help the victim but I'm scared that I'll be the next victim if I get involved, so I try to get help from someone who knows how to properly deal with the situation. I think that I speak for a lot of people when they say that they want to help victims of crimes but don't know the proper way to get involved. That's why I believe that only people who are mature enough to handle the act of violence at least once in every chapter should be allowed to read this book. Violence is a serious offense and it can frighten anybody just seeing or reading about it let alone actually being in it.

Whenever I opened this book to pick up where I left off, I had to mentally prepare myself for all of the explicits I was about to read. On almost every page of this novel, there is at least one explicit. I'd say 90% of the time, they are f-bombs or racial slurs. To me, swear words don't so much affect me, they just sometimes surprise me because some of these words I wonder how people even know what they are. The only swear words that disturb me are racial slurs. I get sort of freaked out by people who use those words like any other words. To me, people who use racial slurs are obviously racist, but I feel like they just don't care about anyone else except themselves.

I find that they are very self-absorbed and just don't care about what others say about them, which is usually a good thing, but not when it comes to using racial slurs. I'd say most of the people I know is offended when people use coarse language, especially racial slurs, to them or even around them. The fact that the main character of this novel is of aboriginal descent and his friends and even his own mother are using racial slurs to his face is sickening. Like I said before, I know that this book is fiction, but the reason I find it so sickening is because there really are people who say racist things to people's faces in the world. I think that explicit language shouldn't be used at all, but since it is, I feel like people aged 14 and up should be allowed to use it and be able to be around people saying it.

I've seen a TV series that is similar to this novel. It's called Shameless. It's definitely not a TV show that people under 18 should watch, but I've heard a lot about it and decided to watch one episode. I absolutely regret watching it. It's all about sex, drugs, and alcohol. The way that people described it made it sound like it was relatively clean, with only a little mention of drugs and alcohol, and I was okay with that. No one ever mentioned anything about sex though, so when I went to watch it, I was completely shocked to see a full on sex scene almost right away.

I don't mind watching sex scenes as long as I don't see anything that's extreme, although it is a bit awkward. But these sex scenes were full on nudity and I felt very uncomfortable watching it. I think anybody would. The reason I made this movie connection to the book is because there is quite a lot of talk about drugs, alcohol, and even sex. I don't mind the drug and alcohol talk, but like I said before, I'm not a huge fan of detailed sex, especially in a book. The overall show is very good and I would have definitely kept on watching it if it wasn't for the amount of sex involved.