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Annotated Award-Winning Titles

		Arthur Ellis Awards (The Crime Writers of Canada) For best juvenile crime novel Quid Pro Quo Vicki Grant Victoria, B.C.: Orca Book Publishers, 2005. 160 p. ISBN 155143394X (bound) ISBN 1551433702 (paperback) Ages 11 to 14
Quid Pro Quo Source

What can be more boring than math class? Attending evening law-school classes with your 28-year-old mother because she cannot afford a babysitter. That is what Cyril McIntyre endured for three years.

Yet, this special training prepared him to face his mother's kidnapping and to solve it. How else would a typical 13-year-old, who eats a lot of junk food and tries to do tricks on a skateboard, know about title research, estoppel, fraud, hearsay and misrepresentation? Cyril relies on legal knowledge to find all the clues that will lead him to his mother. Each chapter of this hilarious whodunit novel begins with some legal term, just like the title itself.

Quid Pro Quo also looks at the life of single mother Andy McIntyre who is trying hard to make a decent living. Andy, a runaway kid who had her first child at the age of 15, manages to raise her son and to graduate from law school. Cyril and his mother rely on food banks for their food, the Salvation Army for their clothes and social services for other needs. Their story of survival is a victory and shows the beauty of a relationship between a mother and her son.

–JP

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