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Fiction. Literature. HTML: Over 10,000 copies sold in Canada! 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..… (more)
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Larry Sole is a teenage boy living in a town in Canada's North-west Territory with his mother and they are of the Dogrib Nation. Larry is in high school and his mother is also going to school hoping to become a teacher. So Larry is pretty much looking after himself. He's a normal teenage boy in that he thinks about sex virtually all the time. He is completely smitten with a girl in his class, Juliet Hope, but he figures he doesn't have a chance with her. And then a new boy comes to town. Johnny Beck is a Metis and he's gorgeous. Johnny also has an eye on Juliet and pretty soon they are going out (that's a euphemism for what they are actually doing). But Johnny and Larry become friends and they spend a lot of time together mostly smoking dope or doing other drugs. Gradually we learn that Larry has a traumatic event in his past that involved his father. The reader has to piece together the hints dropped here and there by Van Camp to figure out what happened and I won't spoil that here. I also don't want to spoil the ending but I feel that I have to say that Larry and Johnny are no longer friends at the end of the book because Johnny did something that Larry finds reprehensible.
This was Van Camp first attempt at a novel and he wrote it when he was in college so there are some first novel issues. In the foreword to the 20th Anniversary edition Van Camp says:
"Larry's story is so dark, so brutal, so raw, so real but ultimately a story of hope and resilience and how love can save lives. Would I change a word after all this time? No. It's done. It's out. It's free."
That shows an author who has matured probably but also recognizes the value of holding on to earlier writings. Well done Richard.