In this piece of biographical fiction, McFarlane follows Albert Forrest from 1898, when his parents moved from Quebec to seek gold in the Yukon, until his 1904 return to Dawson City after the hockey series. McFarlane's writing exposes today's airplane-wise children to the Forrests' turn-of-the-century demanding and dangerous journey which required them to travel by rail, ship, on foot and by small boat before reaching their final destination. McFarlane sketches Albert's growing-up years in Dawson prior to his being asked to join the Nuggets as their goalie, but it is when McFarlane's is describing the hockey action that his writing becomes the most lively and engaging. The amount of direct conversation in the book underlines its fictional nature, and, despite McFarlane's attempts to make Albert a three dimensional character via the use of recreated thoughts and speech, Albert remains "thin" and somewhat distant from readers. For those who have become attached to Albert, however, an epilogue entitled "The Rest of the Story" briefly outlines what happened to Albert, plus some of the book's other characters, in the years that followed.

      While the "Preface" states that The Youngest Goalie "is based on truth," the epilogue adds that "some of the episodes depicted by the author are purely fictional." Unfortunately, McFarlane never identifies the degree to which he has enhanced reality nor does he reveal the source material he drew upon to create the book. Additionally, the volume suffers from a embarrassing surfeit of annoying typographical errors, including word and sentence breaks, which become increasingly distracting.

Recommended with reservations.