Uncle Ronald

by Brian Doyle

Overview

Old Mickey is one hundred and twelve years old. He can't remember what he ate for lunch today, but he can remember every detail of what happened one hundred years ago, when he and his mother ran away from his violent father to take refuge in the hills north of Ottawa.

Brilliantly combining humor and tragedy, Uncle Ronald is one of Brian Doyle's most emotionally powerful novels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780888996213
Publisher:	Groundwood Books
Publication date:	11/15/2004
Pages:	138
Product dimensions:	5.02(w) x 7.46(h) x 0.49(d)
Age Range:	9 - 13 Years

Editorial Reviews

Gr 6-8At age 112, Mickey McGuire is Canada's oldest citizen, but he remembers with perfect clarity the events beginning in Ottawa in 1895. That year, without investigating the cause of his daily fainting spells, school authorities decide that 12-year-old Mickey should stay home. When his bed wetting begins, the boy's efforts to cure the problem ring with both hilarity and pathos. A larger concern is the frequent beatings he and his mother receive at the hands of his alcoholic father. Determined to spare her son further trauma, Mickey's mother sends him to stay on her family's farm run by her brother and twin sisters. Strong and tender, Uncle Ronald is wise in the ways of horses, geese, and men, and is the antithesis of the boy's brutal father. When Mickey's mother arrives after a particularly savage beating, she is sure that her husband will follow. Meanwhile, the entire rural area is also braced for violence. Armed federal troops have arrived to collect back taxes that no one can pay. Mickey's mother's cousins, the legendary O'Malley girls, are stalwart and shrewd in subverting their efforts. Doyle has a wonderful grasp of time and place. His unique storytelling voice weaves sound, sight, and disparate plot elements together into an unusual whole. With warmer, better-drawn characters and a more carefully couched theme than Doyle's Angel Square (Groundwood, 1996), this book will reward and amuse thoughtful readers.Cindy Darling Codell, Clark Middle School, Winchester, KY

School Library Journal

Disconnected plot elements give this quirky tale from Doyle (Spud Sweetgrass, 1996, etc.) a superficial, slapdash air. Fleeing his abusive father, Mickey washes up at his uncle's farm outside a small Quebec town, where, due to some kindness, he loses his intense fear and penchant for bedwetting. Later his battered mother appears, too, with his father hard on her heels; she and Ronald drive him off, but in his rush to get away he falls beneath a passing train. Meanwhile, the town is engaged in a localized tax revolt, playing a variety of amusing pranks on a hapless squad of assessors. Doyle's anile brand of humor—Mickey's account of what happens when he tries to keep his bed dry by attaching a hose to himself will have some readers wincing, and after the tax collectors' wagon wheels are loosened, "policemen's nuts" becomes a running joke—trivializes the story's serious themes, although the serious ultimately weighs down the farcical. Framing the whole episode as a flashback narrated by Mickey at age 112 adds a faintly grotesque, pointless twist. Unlike Spud, this Doyle's a dud.

Kirkus Reviews