Winger

Description

A teenage boy at boarding school grapples with life, love, and rugby in a heartbreakingly funny novel. Ryan Dean West is a fourteen-year-old boy at a boarding school for rich kids. He's living in Opportunity Hall, the dorm for troublemakers, and rooming with the biggest bully on the rugby team. And he's madly in love with his best friend Annie, who thinks of him as a little boy. With the help of his sense of humour, rugby buddies, and his penchant for doodling comics, Ryan Dean manages to survive life's complications and even find some happiness along the way. But when the unthinkable happens, he has to figure out how to hold on to what's important, even when it feels like everything has fallen apart. Filled with hand-drawn illustrations and told in a pitch-perfect voice, this realistic depiction of a teen's experience strikes an exceptional balance of hilarious and heartbreaking.

Andrew Smith always wanted to be a writer. After graduating college, he wrote for newspapers and radio stations, but found it wasn't the kind of writing he'd dreamed about. He bounced around the world before settling down in Southern California as a teacher of at-risk teens, married, and moved to a rural mountain location where he lives with his wife, two children, two horses, three dogs, three cats and one irritable lizard named Leo.