Spud gets angry when he sees Dumper Stubbs, a creepy delivery man, dumping oil into a storm drain and causing terrible pollution in the river. When Spud blows the whistle, he loses his job. Enlisting the help of his buddy, Dink the Thinker, and Connie Pan, Spud thinks he has a chance of regaining his job . . . and stopping the Dumper's harmful activities.
Brian Doyle is a four-time winner of the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year for Children Award. His American honors include being selected for the Horn Book's Fanfare List, the ABA "Pick of the Lists" and the New York Public Library's Best Books for the Teen Age. He has also won the NSK Neustadt Prize, the Phoenix Honor Award, and he has been named a finalist for the Hans Christian Anderson Award. He lives in Chelsea, Quebec.
The pace is quick, the dialogue plentiful, the twists and turns of plot sufficient to satisfy the most exacting fan, as well as pick up a few new converts.
Doyle captures perfectly adolescent thoughts and feelings, and writes of them with humor yet tenderness.
Spud Sweetgrass, with the possibility of being read on a very surface level but also with the potential for readers to recognize sophisticated literary technique, is a rare phenomenon in any novel.
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