Other Side

by Heather Camlot

Overview

Twelve-year-old Liam finds a dead body along the shore at his grandfather's cottage. He can't erase what he's seen and can't focus on anything else, not even the upcoming opportunity of a lifetime to try out for an elite soccer team. Liam believes there is more to the girl's story than her "accidental death" and decides to investigate.

When Liam visits his grandfather, living in palliative care, things go from bad to worse. As they watch Germany's 2014 World Cup soccer games together, his grandfather, a German World War II veteran, reveals stories about his past — stories a Jewish Canadian kid doesn't want to hear. Angry and overwhelmed, Liam is swept up in a history that may just help him solve the girl's death — and make sense of his own world again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780889956742
Publisher:	Red Deer Press
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	723 KB
Age Range:	12 - 16 Years

About the Author

Heather Camlot is an editor and translator who has written for The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, and Canadian Living, among others. She lives in Toronto.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2020-10-22
A suspicious death plunges a Toronto boy deep into the trenches of his paternal grandfather’s past as a German soldier during World War II.

Twelve-year-old Liam Reimold, who is Jewish on his mother’s side, has more to juggle than soccer balls: Tryouts for a prestigious soccer academy are looming, the first step toward his dream of playing for Germany, and his beloved grandfather is terminally ill. And then Liam discovers the body of a teenage girl, washed up on the beach. What might have been a simple whodunit becomes a powerful exploration of family secrets, trauma, and grief, enlivened by the exhilarating furor of soccer. Liam’s sharp, ruminative narration fully immerses readers in his journey. School days and soccer games carry the same emotional intensity as visits to his grandfather or intrusive flashbacks to finding the dead girl in a painfully accurate depiction of post-traumatic stress. Strong family bonds create some of the novel’s most moving scenes, as when Liam struggles to reconcile hatred for his grandfather’s actions during the war with love for the person who taught him everything. Many characters, most of whom are White, are painstakingly sketched, with complex inner lives. However, Liam’s Black friend Alessia is more wise mentor than fully rounded tween. Although the story explores the complexity of individual actions in relation to the Holocaust, Alessia praises Liam’s present-day colorblindness, and his passivity in the face of overt racism is insufficiently explored.

Powerful if uneven. (glossary, selected sources, author interview) (Fiction. 12-14)

Kirkus Reviews