Mal Peet--British author of the Carnegie Medal-winning Tamar, Keeper, The Murdstone Trilogy and more--died in 2015 before he could finish Beck, a YA/adult novel about an English orphan who is sent to Canada in the early 20th century. Printz-winning, London-dwelling author Meg Rosoff (How I Live Now; There Is No Dog) either offered to finish Peet's novel or he asked her... she "can't remember." "If Mal had been alive," she says, "I'd have phoned him every ten minutes to ask if it was okay to change something here, edit something there.... Instead, I was left to raise the baby as my own--with the invaluable help of Mal's wife and creative partner, Elspeth Graham." In the end, she states, "Beck is Mal's book. Like all his work, it's bold and compassionate, unsparing, moving, and joyously, mordantly funny."
The story begins when Beck's mother meets his father in 1907 Liverpool. Beck's mother, a devout Catholic named Anne Beck, "was not a prostitute but in times of need, short of other forms of employment, she would sell herself to men." Beck's father, a man from Africa's "Gold Coast" whose ship had docked in England, was eating a potato on the street when Anne came by: "He was handsome and she was hungry." Eleven years later, on her deathbed, Anne would squeeze her hazel-eyed, brown-skinned son's hand, not knowing he'd soon be taken to the "dire and loveless" Catholic orphanage to become "a hard little bastard," and certainly not knowing he'd be shipped across the ocean in 1922 to a Christian Brotherhood home in Montreal.
Beck's fate is hard to stomach: Peet's story is as "unsparing" as Rosoff says. The boy the priests disturbingly nickname "Chocolat" is locked in a room with the lascivious, pink-eyed, naked-in-a-bathtub Brother Robert, then caned--and much worse--for violently resisting him. Beck is sent off once again, this time as slave labor, to work on a remote Ontario farm where he's made to sleep in the barn with the animals. It sounds brutal, and it is, but young adults are likely to see a gleam of hope in the fierce, brave Beck, who won't let himself be whipped twice. "I fookin' hate 'em," he tells the inspector from the Home Boys' Society, not long before seizing his chance to run away.
Beck ends up heading south to Windsor, near the Detroit River, and lands in the home of a "soft as warmed-up snow" Prohibition-era bootlegger and his kind and beautiful girlfriend, a black couple who, finally, give the young man "the tiniest inkling of the faintest possibility of a life that wasn't simply one hell followed by another...." Forced to resume his grim odyssey across Canada, he encounters another big-hearted, stunning older woman who makes him feel that "faint possibility"--and much more--a half-Scottish, half Siksika (Blackfoot) woman named Grace McAllister who may save him yet again.
Whether a hardened heart can--or should--leave itself vulnerable to love is brilliantly explored in this powerful, vividly told, beautifully written collaboration. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: Mal Peet began this exquisite YA novel about an English orphan shipped off to Canada in 1922; after his death, Printz-winning author Meg Rosoff finished it.