Skud [Hardcover]

Dennis Foon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2003

Dennis Foon's plays, films, books, and television scripts have garnered awards throughout the world, including the British Theatre Award and the International Arts for Young Audiences Award. In Skud, four intense young men -- Tommy, Brad, Andy, and Shane -- are on four distinct paths as they struggle through their last year of high school and prepare for very different futures. Tommy, a model student, is headed for the military; Brad is looking at a hockey career; Andy, who has just secured an agent, may or may not break into the movies. These three have shared a common friendship that is challenged when Andy turns to a new kid -- Shane -- to teach him how to be a punk for an acting audition. While Andy is learning the code of rough, tough, and dangerous from Shane, Brad goads Tommy into a confrontation when Tommy suspects that Andy has stolen his girlfriend. As the foursome squares off, they face their individual demons and their most authentic selves. Can they stand up to the impending tragedy? Will they be able to move beyond it?

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up-When seniors Brad and Tommy suspect Andy of stealing Tommy's girlfriend, they decide to make him pay by beating him up and humiliating him. Unfortunately for them, Shane, a notorious gang member, shows up and claims to be Andy's backup. This unlikely pair forms a tenuous friendship when Shane agrees to help Andy "punk up" for an acting part. Brad runs into subsequent trouble on the hockey team and Tommy, an honor student and school hero, is arrested for raping his former girlfriend. Foon has created this novel from a play he wrote in 1994 by expanding each character's part and alternating chapters among the teens. Readers will respond to the brutality and intensity felt throughout these story threads, and the bully theme rings loud and clear with anyone who has set foot in a high school. The book's small trim size and eye-catching cover should make it an easy sell to reluctant readers.
Lynn Evarts, Sauk Prairie High School, Prairie du Sac, WI
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 13 and up
  
• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Groundwood Books (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0888995369
• ISBN-13: 978-0888995360
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,627,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, June 20, 2003

By 

Cameron M (Toronto, ON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Skud (Hardcover)

Skud is told through the eyes of 4 teens living in a mixed up world filled with violence, rage and sorrow.

Brad is a hotshot hockey player egged on by his demanding father and taught to get his way by any means (like bodychecking) since he was four years old.

Andy is an aspiring actor with dreams of making it big, directing his own movies and living the good life. But when he meets Shane, the toughest guy in the high school, who sells drugs and has killed before, everything changes. Andy sees the softer side of Shane, the one mourning his younger brother, who was killed with a breadknife.

Tommy is the school's golden boy. On the honour roll, soccer team; a cadet who wants to fly F-16s and is going places. But when his girlfriend Sheila breaks up with him, things slowly start unravelling and through the perspectives of these 4 guys, the story of pain unfolds. It's absolutely brilliant.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Richie's Picks: SKUD, April 13, 2003

By 

Richie Partington "Richie's Picks" (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Skud (Hardcover)

"...they killed 40 or 50 of them..."
--US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

"Violence, violence
It's the only thing that'll make you see sense"
--Mott the Hoople

Meet the four high school seniors from Vancouver who narrate SKUD:

Brad:
"We used to practice behind the garage. Me in shorts and T-shirt, with only my [hockey] stick for protection. He had a bucket of stones. He throws, I have to deflect them. I smack the rock or the rock smacks me. He throws hard. If I whimper, he throws harder.
"Once I took my stick and I knocked down a bee's hive. Just to see if I could. Whether I could take it or not. I got thirty-two stings. It was nothing compared to those stones. My dad trained me well."

Tommy:
"Next year I move to the island to train as a fighter pilot. I'll be flying F-16s. See the world. At twice the speed of sound. Once you're strapped in, you're the jet, the jet is you. Not virtual reality. Reality reality. It's you. You plug into it. Become One. The oxygen, the communications. Computer at your fingertips. Only now, you're not this skin and bone, this weakness, this nothing. Now your skin is titanium. Your ears are enhanced radar. Your eyes are infrared thermal sights. You move stratospheric. You have smart bombs, glide bombs, Maverick missile-seeker heads. Boom. You hit the speed of sound once. Boom. You hit it twice. And you keep going. You're passing one thousand two hundred klicks an hour, one thousand three hundred, four hundred, five hundred. And nothing stops you, nothing touches you. You are untouchable."

Shane:
"Once upon a time I had a good backup. I had the best backup in the world.
"He'd take it for me, or me for him, whatever kept us alive. Since we were three, four, five.
"Mama always had a new guy who'd come home tanked, bust us up. Once, I was twelve, New Guy was slamming my face in the wall, painting the plaster red. My backup picks up Mama's hot iron and presses his butt. It worked. New Guy let me go.
"No matter who New Guy was we'd stand up together. Pay the price together. Be the eyes in back of each other's heads.
"We had to. We were brothers."

Andy:
"...I've sworn never to fight unless it's been rehearsed by a certified fight choreographer, and I doubt that Tommy's here for rehearsal.
"He moves closer.
" 'She said you had no interest in her,' I tell him. 'It was over.'
"I immediately wish I could vacuum the words as they spill from my lips. His eyelids go drowsy, hang there like the practice gliders he flies in the sky.
"Then he says, 'You want interest? Here.'
"I don't see it coming. One fist to the gut and I'm down. At least he didn't hit my face."

Inspired by the characters in his play, War, award-winning playwright Dennis Foon has written a gritty tale of four young men, each of whom is coming to terms with his future while dealing with his past. SKUD is the story of the reactions that result when these four individuals smash into each other like highly charged particles in an accelerator.

Brad:
"You have to draw the line in the sand. Make it very clear to the world that no more trespasses will be tolerated. If you do not, there will be a feeding frenzy. The enemy will pick your bones."

Behind this story of hormones and hatred and misplaced honor is a thematic landscape of violence: the culture of violence, the facets of violence, and how young men in our culture are so frequently given no other tools, so that they have only one way of responding to conflict, to frustration, to disappointment, to desire, to injustice. The response to emotion is explosion. Even the young man who does not want his bankable face damaged, since his aspirations lie in a future as an actor, is immersed in our culture's entertainment industry which relies so heavily on glorifying violence to sell tickets.

"...how many pistols smoking coming from a broken family
i'm sick of being tired

sick of tha sirens, body bags, and tha gun firing
tell bush to push tha button cause i'm fed
tired of hearin' these voices in my head
tha streetz R Deathrow"
--2Pac

When Sports reports the results of the latest car race, the video they roll always includes a birds-eye view of the obligatory crash, followed by a look at who pulled out of the collision in one piece to get the checkered flag. Wall-to-wall military reports start sounding like some coach's assessment of his team's free throw percentage or efficacy in converting third down plays.

Leaving it to readers to decide who the victor is, I will note that this SKUD leaves none of these young men unscathed. Certainly, living amidst our culture of violence, how could it be otherwise?

Richie Partington