Fifteen-year-old Nipishish, a Métis orphan, finds things have changed for the worse on the Lac Cabonga reserve when he returns home after being kicked out of residential school. Loggers are altering the northern Quebec landscape, alcohol and a government housing lottery are changing Algonquin lifestyle, and recreational hunting by whites is destroying the harmony between humans and animals. Realizing there’s little chance now of achieving his dream to live as a hunter, trapper, and fisher, a conflicted Nipishish gambles on a fresh start and leaves voluntarily when the government fosters him out to an off-reserve couple to complete his schooling.

When this second foray into the white world goes bad, Nipishish’s reserve “mother” and friends come for him. Valuing his knowledge of languages and whites, they enlist his help to win respect for the Algonquin people and the right to live in peace. Back on the reserve and out on the traplines, Nipishish comes of age as he embraces his heritage, fronts resistance to a logging contract, challenges a government cover-up about his father’s death, and commits to a relationship and impending fatherhood.

Good for Nothing, originally published in French as three novels, is a hefty teen read. However, Michel Noël, author of more than 50 books, and winner of two major Canadian French-language children’s literature awards, knows his craft. With a structure of 47 brief chapters distributed over three time-defined segments, and with Shelley Tanaka’s able translation, the text is extremely accessible. Readers familiar with Slash, Jeannette Armstrong’s groundbreaking 1980s novel, will note plot similarities but a tone free of anger, militancy, and didacticism.

Noël, an advocate of aboriginal causes, draws on logging camp and government employment backgrounds to imbue this book with a sense of authenticity. His masterful use of similes establishes and firmly reinforces Nipishish’s connection with nature. Noël weaves native spirituality respectfully through the story and offsets frequent episodes of cruelty, closed-mindedness, and ignorance with occasional instances of kindness and openness. He raises but doesn’t wallow in such issues as colonization, resource exploitation, residential school abuse, reserve malaise, two-way stereotyping, and the impact of status policy on native women and the Métis.

Some might say the romance is too ideal and the ending too optimistic, but the hopeful ending is consistent with an observation made in the book: “We are like the tortoise. We will move ahead slowly, but we will go a long way.” Good for Nothing is an important addition to our growing body of Ablit.