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Awards & Honours
Winner
Ontario Library Association’s 2011 OLA White Pine Award
Shortlisted
Stellar Book Award
Shortlisted
2007 Canadian Library Association
Young Adult Book of the Year Award
The multi-layered, engrossing, complex tale reveals a unique coming-of-age novel peopled by characters whose strengths and weaknesses form a framework for the plot twists. In remarkable, keenly observed detail, (Scarsbrook) excels at capturing ordinary and extraordinary moments of life in a tale to engage and entertain readers of any age.
****/Four Stars, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
— CM Magazine
Volume XVII Number 2 (September 10, 2010)
This is a frenetic trip, and Richard Scarsbrook packs a wallop of modern day ills and Canadiana into 300 pages. This page turner rocks and rolls, and if you’re interested in fundamental Christians, sex, hockey, Toronto, motorcycles, homemade porno, small town politics, dysfunctional families, profanity, wine, and cemeteries, then this is the book for you. Scarsbrook is an excellent writer with great comic overtones … Philip is a very likeable protagonist who sometimes appears to be the only character in the book with his feet on the ground. He is totally appealing.
— Resource Links magazine
Volume 15, Number 5
This book is a wild ride! It starts with a kid who is picked on at school and doesn’t fight back, so I was totally on board. Then it goes careening off in several different directions. The story is both small, in the sense of having characters that are very real, and epic, in the scale of the story. It reminds me of the books of Paul Quarrington and John Irving, creating an over-the-top yet close-to-real world.
— Ann Ewan
Author of Firedrake and Brondings’ Honour
Richard Scarsbrook’s third novel for young adults demonstrates his versatility with a very powerful and dramatic story … There are many dramatic and unexpected twists in this novel, but there is also a liberal amount of humour and irony, which keeps it both entertaining and readable … Fans of the author’s previous works will not be disappointed.
RECOMMENDED
— Canadian Children’s Book News
Summer 2010
The Monkeyface Chronicles is a riveting read aimed at the YA crowd. It’s a story of adolescent revenge played out against a backdrop of the extremes of modern life. The book is a real page turner and hard to put down … If it were a TV program it would come complete with a warning about everything. But, oddly likeable.
Four out of Five Stars (“Really Liked It”)
— Anne Letain, from www.goodreads.com
A dark story about bullying with numerous twists, that still finishes with a hopeful yet bittersweet ending. It reminds us that no matter how messed up our families may be, often, they are are our strongest and most important bonds.
Four out of Five Stars (“Really Liked It”)
— Rachel Siegel, from www.goodreads.com