END OF THE GAME

by Hila Colman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1971

With a suburban family playing summer hosts to a black child from the ghetto, Hila Colman tackles a Social Problem with upper case earnestness. As in Claudia Where are You (1969), the children are more realistically characterized than the stereotyped liberal mother; uneasily solicitous when nine-year-old Donny arrives, she descends readily to racist outrage upon the first domestic crisis: ""You want to help people, but they make it impossible. . .You can't trust them, not any of them. I'm afraid they all hate whites and that's all there is to it. The papers are full of stories."" The plot, though, is ingenious and wholly probable in its development. The name of the Game is scapegoat; it begins when Donny breaks an expensive lamp and Mrs. Stevens doesn't scold him as she would her own children. Remembering that occasion, her twelve-year-old twin girls talk Donny into taking the blame for their subsequent misdeeds, and soon Mrs. Stevens comes to assume his general guilt. When the girls finally start a kitchen grease fire, Donny doesn't wait to be blamed; he and young Timmy Stevens, now his friend, head for the woods, triggering a confession from the girls and a diatribe on racial game-playing from Donny's mother (on hand to take him home) that is as unlikely as any of Mrs. Stevens' outbursts. There's truth and tension, though, in the events, and promise in the boys' final parting: ""'Will you come see me in New York sometime?' 'Sure, you just ask me.' The two boys looked straight at each other, neither one of them looking to their parents for approval. 'I'll ask you,' Donny said.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: World

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971

Categories: FICTION