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CM . . .
. Volume X Number 2. . . . September 19, 2003
excerpt: Tom had forgotten who he was. Something had happened to him, but that was the first thing he forgot. He remembered he had started walking because he couldn't run anymore. His back and rear end hurt all the way through to his stomach. He forgot if he had a friend as he walked down the steep hill. As the streets became busier he forgot if he'd ever passed Tadpoles, and if he'd ever known what you say to a girl when you like her. By the time the shops began, he forgot what his mark was on his last spelling test, and if he knew what it felt like to get punched in the face, and what his mother looked like. By the time the shops were shadowed by the high downtown towers, he'd forgotten his last name. Tom is somewhere in Calgary, drawn to the city centre by some force he can't quite explain — gravity, perhaps. He doesn't even remember what is in his backpack, and when he rummages through it, all he finds are a paperclip, a candy, and a coil notebook. In the notebook, he has written information about "a guy named Mozart," although he can't remember why or when he wrote the notes. Crashing for the night in a riverside park, he wakes up the next morning and meets an older man, Samuel Wolflegs, who saves him from a menacing gang. Tom is the answer to Samuel's prayer for a "Finder," someone who will help him in his quest to find his lost son, Daniel. And, although Tom insists that he cannot find anyone, for he is lost himself, Samuel assures Tom that he will find the son that has been lost to the streets. At first, Tom finds the necessary things that enable him to survive on the streets: bits of food, temporary shelter, the left-overs of life, cast away by the urban jungle. It is a tough existence, and he learns to live by his wits very quickly, indeed. Hope keeps him going: the hope that he will find Daniel, the hope that he will find his parents or that his parents will find him, and the hope that he will find out who he really is. Throughout his quest, he is tantalized by clues from his notebook, bits of Mozart's Magic Flute, and the shreds of memory which come back, sometimes unbidden, and sometimes through a chance encounter or a sudden flash of insight. Increasingly, he becomes convinced that Mozart's opera holds the key to himself, and when he finally manages to attend a performance, he is overwhelmed by a flood of memory: Tom Finder is really Tom Nader, and his home is nothing like the hopeful fantasies he had spun. This was not the first time he has run away, and when we find out that home is a crummy apartment, shared with an alcoholic mother and her abusive partner, it's surprising that he even contemplates returning. At the end, Tom has a choice: return to a hopeless existence or to create a new life and self out of all that has happened. Strengthened by this latest episode as a runaway, and sustained by the faith of Samuel Wolflegs, whose son he does indeed find, he chooses the latter. Martine Leavitt's previous work has been fantasy fiction, and so a story about the gritty realities of a 15-year-old's life on the streets in Calgary's downtown core seems like a total change of direction. However, Tom's loss of memory gives his existence an other worldly quality, and his quest to find out who he is, is not unlike the quests undertaken by heroes of fantastic fiction. Tom Finder is not your typical story of a teen runaway - the narrative is sophisticated, and although the story of a journey, it's not driven purely by plot. It's not a book for every teen reader, but those who typically read fantasy set in another time and place might enjoy this story based in the here and now experience of a young man on the run from his past and towards his future. Recommended. Joanne Peters is a teacher-librarian at Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, MB.
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