The Middle of Everywhere

By Monique Polak

Noah Thorpe is spending the school term in George River, in Quebec's Far North, where his dad is an English teacher in the Inuit community. Noah's not too keen about living in the middle of nowhere, but getting away from Montreal has one big advantage: he gets a break from the bully at his old school. But Noah learns that problems have a way of following you -- no matter how far you travel. To the Inuit kids, Noah is a qallunaaq—a southerner, someone ignorant of the customs of the North. Noah thinks the Inuit have a strange way of looking at the world, plus they eat raw meat and seal blubber. Most have never left George River -- a town that doesn't even have its own doctor, let alone a McDonald's. But Noah's views change when he goes winter camping and realizes he will have to learn a few lessons from his Inuit buddies if he wants to make it home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
• Release date: Oct 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781554690916

Monique Polak

Monique Polak is the author of more than thirty books for young people. She is the three-time winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Prize for Children's and YA Literature for her novels Hate Mail, What World is Left and Room for One More. In addition to teaching at Marianopolis College in Montreal, Monique is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Maclean's Magazine, the Montreal Gazette and other Postmedia newspapers. She is also a columnist on ICI Radio-Canada's Plus on est de fous, plus on lit! In 2016, Monique was the CBC/Quebec Writers' Federation inaugural writer-in-residence. Monique lives in Montreal.

Reviews for The Middle of Everywhere

[librarybrandy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Noah has recently moved from Montreal to George River, in Quebec's Far North, to spend a school term with his father in the isolated Inuit community. Living in a town of 700 people, with only one road, two stores, and no McDonald's is a pretty big adjustment, but there are certain things that still remind him of home--particularly Lenny, who reminds Noah of a bully back home. Beyond those basic things, though, Noah is learning about a whole new way of life--a way of life in which dogs are work animals and not pets, where emergencies arise and it can take several hours to get help, where people have to depend on each other (even if they don't get along) because there's no one else to depend on.

Noah's story is quick-reading but slow-paced. Primarily this is a book about learning to appreciate other cultures despite not understanding them, about overcoming the fish-out-of-water feeling any 15-year-old would have in experiencing such a drastic change in living conditions. Several non-essential characters become an amalgam of "townspeople," and even some of the foreground characters are cutouts instead of developed characters. As with many Orca titles, the writing relies heavily on spelling things out and using Meaningful Metaphors About Life in talking about life in the North, both of which will annoy strong readers but help the struggling ones. This isn't the survivalist story the cover copy implies, but a quieter, finding-your-inner-strength-and-compassion story instead. Recommended for early high school. (Nothing objectionable, but I doubt if middle-schoolers would be interested.)

[jrlibrary · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

15 year old Noah Thorpe goes to George River to spend some time with his father, who is a teacher there. When Noah first arrives, he takes his dad's dog for a walk, and allows it to get hit by a truck. Most of the townspeople feel that it makes sense to kill the dog and put it out of its misery, and that's Noah's first exposure to how different life in the North is from life in the south. A good story that would pair well with "Northern Exposure".