Ink Me

✍ Scribed by Scrimger, Richard

• Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 268 KB
• Series: Seven 4
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Bunny (real name Bernard) doesn't understand why his late grandfather wants him to get a tattoo. Actually, Bunny doesn't understand a lot of things, so it's good that his older brother, Spencer, is happy to explain things to him. But this is a task Bunny is supposed to do on his own, and nobody is more surprised than Bunny when, after he gets tattooed, he is befriended by a kid named Jaden and adopted into Jaden's gang. The gang hangs out at a gym, where Bunny learns to fight, but when it finally dawns on him that the gang is involved in some pretty shady—and dangerous—business, Bunny is torn between his loyalty to his new friends and doing what he knows is right.

Review

"Readers will be too engrossed in the upshot of Bunny's honesty and incomprehension to realize that Ink Me exposes the vulnerability of perceptions to misinterpretation...A brilliant story, less about gangs and tattoos than about our relationships with others and the roles misunderstanding and perspective play in securing or destroying the integrity of those connections." (CanLit for Little Canadians blog 20120916)

"An exciting story [with] a lot of hearty laughs at Bunny's misunderstandings and their consequences." (CM Magazine 20120907)

"[An] enjoyable fable of Toronto gang life recorded in believable, phonetically spelled prose...Most intellectually disabled characters in children's fiction are siblings or pals whose treatment by other characters signals their compassion or otherwise. Bunny's a rare hero-not on anyone's journey but his own." (Kirkus Reviews 20120901)