Growing up in Toronto in the 1950s, a young hockey fan is riveted by his father’s tales of the glory days of the Toronto Maple Leafs. His dad remembers when Big Train Lionel Conacher and his brother Charlie rocketed across the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens leading the Kid Line, the bright young players who whirled themselves into the hearts of hockey fans. Dad has his own story too, of his life as a bricklayer, sideswiped by the Second World War, and now reduced to scalping tickets outside the Gardens on game night. A chance encounter with Charlie Conacher at a playoff game leads to a magical dream where the boy himself gets to lead the Kid Line alongside his dad and his hero.

The Kid Line is sadly the last Teddy Jam book; Teddy Jam, better known in adult circles as Matt Cohen, died in December 1999. It’s a book that shares the imaginative power and integrity of his most recent children’s books, The Stoneboat and The Fishing Summer, as well as a resonant, almost tactile nostalgia for a past world of local heroes, dreams, and ordinary lives. It’s the story, on the one hand, of so many Canadian kids, boys and girls, mesmerized by hockey, playing the game for the sheer love of it but all the while dreaming of joining their heroes on the ice. It’s a book that pulses with the excitement of hockey, but it’s also a gentle, loving story of a father and son finding in the game something that brings them together again and again.

Ange Zhang’s acrylic illustrations perfectly capture the mood of The Kid Line. His on-ice paintings evoke the cold of the rink and the sweep of the game but his palette also includes warm earthy browns and yellows that help create the sense that this is a story of time past. He’s to be particularly complimented for those wonderful framing illustrations of Maple Leaf Gardens that begin and end the story and perfectly conjure up the Gardens on a cold Saturday night.