FernFolio

When their mother dies and their father sinks into a depression and stops noticing them, twelve year-old Sydney and her eight year-old brother, Turk, decide to run away and return to the farm where they spent the happiest summer of their lives.
The two children sneak onto a train going west and ride the rails from Toronto to Manitoba. As their long journey reaches its end, Sydney and Turk are filled with excitement at the thought of seeing Uncle Frank and Aunt Lily, and of spending another summer roaming the wide fields and playing along the banks of the Rat River, which runs through their farm. However anticipation turns to disappointment when they arrive at the farm and find it gone. In its place stands a new housing development, The Royal Woods, and a shopping mall.
With the farm gone and Uncle Frank and Aunt Lily moved away, Sydney and Turk must find somewhere to live and somehow to make enough money to eat. With the help of a Shep, a homeless man who lives in a shack along the Rat River, the children manage to unlock the door to one of the houses sitting empty and ready for sale in The Royal Woods.
After a rather comical run through a car wash, without a car, Sydney and Turk come to the attention of Kumar, the gas bar attendant. Kumar, an illegal immigrant from India, rapidly realizes that Sydney and her brother are runaways. He makes sure they eat properly and worries about whether they have a safe place to sleep. Kumar urges them to contact their father, but doesn’t insist when Sydney refuses to do so because he does not want to come to the attention of the police.
Sydney and Turk also make the acquaintance of three boys, Morton, Chad and Brad, who live in The Royal Woods, and who delight in looking for trouble. When this gang decides to have some ‘fun’ with Shep, Sydney and her brother come to the homeless man’s defence and start an escalating series of skirmishes that nearly ends in disaster.
The Royal Woods is an engaging story about two very likeable kids who set off to reclaim the past and find themselves, instead, in the midst of a suburban comic nightmare. They meet some very memorable characters, Shep, Kumar, Chip and Rene, and learn a thing or two about human nature and about themselves, too.
This is a lovely book, worth a read by children from Grade 4.
FernFolio Editor