As playgrounds are for kids, so is the cityscape for parkour enthusiasts, otherwise known as traceurs. Play is theme of this month’s issue of PaperTigers and so I have selected a young adult book that explores the world of parkour. In parkour, one aims to get to a destination by negotiating with the physical objects of a place by jumping, leaping, running, or doing whatever necessary to clear the ‘obstacle,’ so to speak. Parkour has become very popular and there are many videos of it to be seen on YouTube. It is really a way to ‘play’ the city like a child would in a playground.
Anita Daher’s Two Foot Punch (Orca, 2007) has as its heroine, a young fifteen year old traceuse (a female parkour athlete), named Nikki, who has moved to Winnipeg, Canada from Toronto. She leaves behind a tragic past — the death of her parents — an incident which involved her eighteen year old brother, Derek, also a traceur. While adjusting to life in a new city with her brother and their new guardian, their Aunt Sylvia who is a judge in the criminal court system, Nikki begins to explore Winnipeg’s colorful downtown district known as The Exchange through parkour. She makes a friend, Rain, who joins her, and the two of them unwittingly stumble onto an illegal operation taking place in the many empty warehouse spaces of the district. Nikki’s brother, Derek, is unfortunately involved, and Nikki must take action in order to save him.
Do you have parkour enthusiasts in your city? Have you noticed young people jumping, leaping, running across and over and up buildings, bike racks, walls in certain parts of town? It could be a parkour group. In talking to Anita Daher, I found out that Winnipeg has its own group called Winnipeg Parkour who meet regularly in a downtown location called the Oodena Celebration Circle at the Forks (where the two rivers of the city, the Assiniboine and the Red, intersect.) I’ve yet to see them in action, but now with summer on us, I’m sure I’ll catch a glimpse of them sometime soon! In the meantime, check out this brand new illustration of parkour at the right by Toronto illustrator David Namisato whose book I reviewed for the PaperTigers website.
This year Orca has three authors participating in the