Contents:
Thirteen-year-old Declan lives only for revenge. His mother, father and sister were all killed on the streets of Belfast, and Declan will stop at nothing to settle the score. When he is torn away from his native soil and sent to live with relatives in Canada, he is disgusted by their efforts to welcome him into their lives, and determined to make them regret their hospitality. Can he devise a plan to return to Ireland and rejoin his cause? Or will the strange beauty of his new life and surroundings weaken his resolve?








Extract from book:
School.
There was a time when he had liked school — he had enjoyed history, especially Irish history, with its brave stories of Ireland's heroes and patriots — but he had stopped going there after ... after the bomb.

He had joined Brendan Fogarty's gang instead. None of them went to school. Brendan, sixteen, was the oldest. At eleven, Kevin Payne was the youngest. The Holy Terrors. Their number varied between seven and ten members, depending on whether the school inspector or the police managed to catch some of them and force them back to school for awhile.

Rebels with a cause, that was the Holy Terrors.
The way Brendan Fogarty explained it was this: "In the north of Ireland it's a war between them and us, between the Brits — the English — and the Catholics. The British soldiers are supposed to be in Ireland keeping the peace between us and the Protestants. Which is fine, except the way it works out is the Brits are on the side of the Protestants. And it's us, the Catholics, who get the house-to-house searches at three o'clock in the morning, battering down our doors and pulling us from our beds and destroying everything they can put their filthy hands on while they pretend they're searching for a gun or a bomb."

Kevin Payne, as young as he was, said, "The English have no right in Ireland! Let them go back to their own country!" "That's the good lad," said Brendan.

So they became rebels with a cause, and the grim, narrow streets in the Falls Road and Shankill areas, with their dirty, crumbling nineteenth-century houses, became their jungle and their battle-ground. They threw stones at British soldiers; they hurled gasoline bombs at the British Land Rovers and armored cars under the cover of night; they helped the young men, all unemployed, make nail bombs. They became young terrorists.

And as well as their British enemies, they also had the Irish Protestant militants and the Ulster police, who were mostly Protestants, after them. And if that wasn't enough, their own IRA, the provisional branch of the Irish Republican Army — or Provos as they were called — might take it into their heads to kneecap them for the mischief they got up to. Kneecapping meant you were crippled for life. Not that they had ever shot the knees or ankles of a child (ankles were a more popular target nowadays because of the greater pain and disability), but you could never tell — they seldom hesitated to impose their own brand of law and order among their own, even if it was the milder punishment of having a heavy concrete block dropped on your arm or leg until the limb snapped. Life was brutish and cruel. His uncle drove on.

How many miles behind him to be retraced? Declan wondered. How would he ever find his way back? The farther they drove, the more impossible seemed his escape. The road began to wind through a great forest; there were trees everywhere Declan looked, evergreens, he knew that much, but what kind they were he did not know and did not care. He felt tired and ... lost. The dark, brooding forest seemed to him a secret, unknown world, impenetrable and dark, and he was filled with the terrible numbness of despair. They emerged from the forest into the brightness of sea and sky, but he closed his eyes and saw very little of it.

The road now twisted around coves and bays. Purple-gray rocks, jagged and dark, thrust themselves into the shining sea, but he merely glimpsed it. He sat with his eyes half-closed, exhausted. It was as though all the past weeks he had been fueled by a special kind of hatred that had pumped up his muscles and his sinews to a constant, explosive pitch, and only now had he let go, only now had his strength collapsed. He felt totally worn out. His head ached from the thioridazine; it felt like his brain was being crushed. His tongue was dry and swollen. He cared about nothing. He thought he would like to die.
pp. 17-19

About the author:
James Heneghan has come at life from different angles. Now a Canadian citizen, he came to his adopted country from his native England. Now an author of books for juveniles and young adults, he came to writing by way of police work and high school English teaching. His novels have been praised by critics and awards committees alike, both in Canada and the United States. With works such as Torn Away, Wish Me Luck, The Grave, Flood, and the mysteries in the "O'Brien Detective Agency" series, Heneghan is credited with bringing a fresh approach to the genre novel for young adults and primary graders. Addressing such literature as the mystery, the YA novel, the war story, the science fiction adventure, and the time-slip tale, he writes comic fiction and action-filled stories for younger readers and deeper, more thoughtful books for teenagers; several of his books are set in British Columbia and others begin in his hometown of Liverpool, England.


Buchdaten:
Taschenbuch: 140 Seiten
Verlag: Cornelsen Verlag (November 1999)
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN-10: 9783464068250
ISBN-13: 978-3464068250
ISBN: 3464068250
Preis: € 9,50