FernFolio

It’s Christmas of 1945, the first Christmas since the end of the War, and Tommy is troubled to learn that his best friend Sammy’s father has been beaten up and left in a coma. Is it because somebody wants his job at the streetcar barns, or because he’s a Jew? Tommy, who is a big fan of the popular radio show, The Shadow (Who know what evil lurks in the hearts of men… The Shadow knows!), decides to do some investigating, with the help of his friends Coco Laframbroise and Gerald Hickey.
Tommy attends York Street School, one of three schools that borders onto Angel Square in Ottawa’s Lower Town. While York Street students are, for the most part, Jews, the students of St Brigit’s are Irish Catholics, Dogans, and the students of Brother Bréboeuf are French Canadians, Pea Soups. To get to school each day, Tommy must cross Angel Square, a place where groups form along ethnic and religious lines, and where, each day, rivalries are sorted out, in the time-honoured way of boys, through fights. What seems initially to be almost shockingly violent and un-PC proves, as the story unfolds, to be a complex and civilised form of social interaction. The boys of Angel Square, quite literally, settle their problems, whether large or small, themselves.
Tommy, as The Shadow, doesn’t quite belong in any of the gangs of Angel Square. He isn’t Jewish, or Catholic, or French Canadian; he’s nothing, but the three boys he calls best friends come, each of them, from one these groups. Tommy fights and plays with boys from each community. He also works both at Talmud Torah, the local synagogue, cleaning floors, and at St Brigit’s, where he serves as an altar boy. He also sings in the choir at St Albany’s Anglican church.
Tommy calls upon his friends in each of Lower Town’s communities to help him uncover the identity of the man who has assaulted Sammy’s father. French Canadians, Irish Catholics and Jews, they lend their support to Tommy as he follows up the leads and interviews potential witnesses. The final settling of accounts with the villain is true to the spirit of Angel Square.
Brian Doyle is a wonderful writer. Angel Square is the first novel of five about Tommy and his friends from Lower Town. Doyle won the prestigious NSK Neustadt Prize in 2005 for Children’s Literature. He is one of Canada’s very finest writers for children.
FernFolio Editor