Collision

It’s just a normal day in Daniel’s small town until reports go out about an accident at the shipping canal.

Thirteen-year-old Daniel and his friend Noah race to the banks and see that two container ships have collided and are blocking the canal. Daniel watches as first responders pull the crew from the ships, and soon they discover more people on board: refugees trafficked in a shipping container.

While the refugees are taken to hospital, where Daniel’s mom is the head nurse, an investigation is launched, led in part by Daniel’s dad, a police detective. Daniel is visiting his mom at the hospital when he meets Bol, a refugee his age from South Sudan. When Bol is too scared to be given an IV he desperately needs, Daniel offers up his arm for an IV with saline solution, and shows Bol it won’t hurt. The two boys form a friendship playing video games together and communicating by learning new words in each other’s language. But not everyone is so welcoming. Outside the hospital, protesters gather, chanting “Go home!” Still, Daniel sees others ready and willing to help. Can the community rally and prove that love is stronger than hate?

Praise for Danson Mutinda and Eric Walters:

? “This simple story of discovery, sport, and friendship is filled with likeable characters and innocently joyful moments...Delightful.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review for Hockey Night in Kenya

Key Selling Points

• When two ships crash in the canal in Daniel’s hometown, people are discovered in one of their shipping containers, hungry and weak. Since his parents are frontline workers, Daniel gets a firsthand view of how the aftermath unfolds, and he develops a friendship with one of the survivors, a boy his age who comes to live with his family.
• Eric Walters and Danson Mutinda have woven a sensitive and touching story that gives readers an age-appropriate understanding of human smuggling, and an empathetic perspective on why people risk their lives to find new homes.
• The story doesn’t shy away from some of the closed-mindedness and prejudice that can rear its head in reaction to refugees, but its focus is on how the community rallies to help the newcomers, and how love is stronger than hate.
• A fictional take on real-life stories of migrants who risk their lives boarding shipping containers to travel to safer destinations.
• Eric Walters and Danson Mutinda have collaborated previously on the book Hockey Night in Kenya.

Eric Walters is a Member of the Order of Canada and the author of over 130 books that have collectively won more than 100 awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Young People’s Literature for The King of Jam Sandwiches. A former teacher, Eric began writing as a way to get his fifthgrade students interested in reading and writing. Eric is a tireless presenter, speaking to over 100,000 students per year in schools across the country. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.

Danson Mutinda is an ICT consultant based in Kenya, and he is also the current patron of Hope Development Centre, an orphanage in Kenya that his parents, Ruth and Henry Kyatha, cofounded with Eric and Anita Walters in 2007. When Henry passed away in 2013, Danson became patron of the program. It has helped improve the lives of over 300 children and over 150 households in the Mbooni region of Kenya. Danson lives in Kikima, Kenya, on the grounds of the orphanage with his beloved wife and five kids. When not writing or consulting, you can find him tending to numerous crops and various livestock on the family farm. This is his and Eric’s second collaboration, having cowritten Hockey Night in Kenya in 2020.