The bird song and the crisp sharp mornings are something to be enjoyed while a boy waits for his father. This father is not to be called Dad, but just John. John has given the boy instructions. Don’t look in the bag given to him. Hide it somewhere safe. Look after their seedlings planted for summer eating, and stay safe inside their home.

Home is a beat up caravan that in winter, feels like “…sleeping in a sardine can inside a fridge.” Meals are what they can forage from the nearby forest and catch to eat over a fire. The boy didn’t always live like this. His mum wants him to go home to her at the estate, but the boy knows John needs him more.

Iraq and Afghanistan have made John into somebody different. He’s angry at the rich, the powerful, the fools and sometimes the entire world it seems, to the boy. But he knows when John gets like that, when he thrashes in his sleeping bag at night, lashing out or raging against life when he’s awake, he is the only one who can calm his father back to sensibility. Even mum can’t do that.

The boy enjoys listening to John, lapping up his advice about people, his stories of mythical creatures that lived in the very woods they live in now, and his love of poet and painter William Blake. It’s the wolves and giant stag and bison that capture his imagination and fill his dreams though.

The boy knows John isn’t a bad man, but his bad choices have put him in prison. This is why the boy waits.

Then John is out. With more plans and schemes and ways to be finally happy. Ways to get even and pay a debt. The boy knows he is wrong,  but he will help, because he loves his father and that’s all he knows how to do.

I cannot deny the cover drew me in first, then as I settled in to read what I could already see was a beautiful book, I met a boy all on his own. The complicated relationship between this boy and his father is introduced gradually and then laid bare when John returns from prison.

John’s PTSD doesn’t allow him to live normally inside their council estate flat, preferring nature and space. His son knows how damaged John is, but still worships him regardless. This loyalty and love is heartbreaking as the boy struggles with wanting to be with his dad or returning home to his mum who worries and misses him.

John’s dangerous descent is swift and his son is left with the aftermath.

Told in first person directly to the reader. Sombre, dark and stunningly illustrated.

Author / Illustrator – Jason Cockcroft

Age – 13+

(2021, Walker Books Aust, Animals, Magical Realism, Family, Conflict, Growing up, Love, Poverty, Myths, Neglect, Caravan, Dog, Crime, Escape, PTSD, Afghanistan, Iraq, Soldier, Living off the land, Poetry, William Blake)