The 20th-anniversary edition of Richard Van Camp's best-selling
coming-of-age story, with a new introduction and story by the author
Larry is a Dogrib Indian growing up in the small northern town of Fort
Simmer. His tongue, his hallucinations and his fantasies are hotter than
the center of the sun. At sixteen, he loves Iron Maiden, the North and
Juliet Hope, the high school "tramp."
In this powerful and very funny first novel, Richard Van Camp gives us
one of the most original teenage characters in Canadian fiction. Skinny
as spaghetti, nervy and self-deprecating, Larry is an appealing mixture
of bravado and vulnerability. His past holds many terrors: an abusive
father, blackouts from sniffing gasoline, an accident that killed
several of his cousins, and he's now being hunted and haunted by a pack
of blue monkeys. But through his new friendship with Johnny, a Metis who
just moved to town, he's now ready to face his memories -- and his
future.
The Lesser Blessed is an eye-opening depiction of what it is to be a
young Dogrib man in the age of AIDS, disillusionment with Catholicism,
and a growing world consciousness.