Eliza was shy, independent, and bookish like me, but she was also very different. I related to Eliza in many ways, especially her hesitation to befriend someone who was most likely a bad influence, but also one of the most exciting people at the school. Will Eliza be brave enough for the Daring Game? As a resolutely Truth-oriented player, I found this dilemma fascinating and terrifying. The dares get progressively more dangerous, going against all school rules, and Eliza has to decide whether she’ll participate and win Helen’s affections, or be the good girl she has always been. Helen is always getting into trouble, and introduces a Daring Game in the girls’ dorm.
At Ashdown, Eliza meets Helen, an unhappy girl whose parents don’t seem to want her around. She starts Grade 7 at a posh private school called Ashdown, navigating friendships, looming adolescence, and homesickness. In that book, 11-year-old Eliza Chapman chooses to go to boarding school in Vancouver while her parents move “out east” to Toronto for a year. My first Pearson book was The Daring Game. Pearson’s books were the first I read that featured Canada as an important and integral part of their stories and characters, and were my gateway to other quintessential Canadian authors like Bernice Thurman Hunter, L. Pearson’s books are fun, thoughtful, and Canadian to the core. When I was somewhere between the ages of eight and ten, I discovered Kit Pearson, a Canadian author whose books for young people are classics- The Daring Game, Guests of War, A Handful of Time, and Awake and Dreaming are the ones that come to mind immediately-but she has been writing for decades. But even though I have fallen down on my CanLit reading as an adult, it was one of my favourites as a tween. I was never drawn to the genre outside of required reading for school, and I can’t pinpoint where exactly my immersion in my national literary culture went awry.
ĭespite liking both books and Canada, I’m not really a CanLit fan. Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite last wrote for The Toast about Bend it Like Beckham.
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