Vicky Parker loves soccer. Her mother does not. It’s never been a problem because Vicky has always known where her passion comes from. Every game, she puts on the red jersey that belonged to her father, who left when she was three and who she barely remembers, and knows that he would be proud to see her play.
At Killarney Senior Secondary in East Vancouver, Vicky plays goalkeeper for the Ravens along with her best friend, defender Parm Johal. But when her mother’s new job forces Vicky to move to another school, she encounters challenges she has never faced before: new friends, new boys and a rival goalkeeper who doesn’t like her very much.
With much of the popular crowd turned against her from the start, Vicky finds two sympathetic souls in Marjan Hazemi, a small but feisty Iranian-Canadian girl, and Christie Brown, who smiles frequently but hardly says a word. Troubled more and more by her Chinese-Canadian mother’s indifference to the sport she loves, Vicky quickly forms a bond with Marjan, who has finally persuaded her conservative parents to let her play on a team for the first time. As the games begin, Vicky struggles to balance soccer with friends, romance, school and family, unaware that she is about to discover a secret that will change her life.
James Lorimer & Company Ltd, 2009
Trevor Kew is a Vancouver teacher and writer presently teaching in Japan. He spends as much time as possible playing soccer, coaching soccer or simply staring at the wall and thinking about soccer. Trading Goals is his first novel, though he hopes to write more about Vicky Parker and her friends, who were inspired by the many students he has watched enjoy this wonderful sport. Teaching abroad has enabled him to travel to a wide variety of soccer-mad nations, from Spain and Italy to Russia, Japan and Iran. He packs his boots wherever he goes, just in case.
