Juiceboxers
2024, Freehand Books
Winner of the 2025 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize
Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award
Shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Sixteen-year-old Plinko, attending basic training in the summer before high school starts up again in the fall, acquired his nickname when he happened to mention The Price is Right to another recruit. Feeling adrift from his own family after graduation, Plinko moves in with an older soldier, where he forges an unlikely group of friends: Walsh, who moves in shortly after Plinko does; Abdi, whose Somalian immigrant parents often welcome the group of young men over for dinner; and the unpredictable and gun-loving Krug, who is brash and exasperating yet magnetic. The four are variously involved with the military – Plinko, for instance, works as a reservist on weekends and Wednesday evenings – and they fill their days with school, part-time jobs, watching movies, ordering pizza, playing video games late into the night.
And then – 9/11. As the military prepares to move into Afghanistan, the trajectories of the four friends’ lives are changed irrevocably. Drawn from the author’s experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers tenderly traces the story of a young man’s journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the oil fields of Alberta, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and violence, loss and trauma, ideology and innocence.
Praise for Juiceboxers
“Juiceboxers is an unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war’s physical and emotional derangements. So many moments in Benjamin Hertwig’s dark but ultimately tender novel reminded me, with eerie precision, of things I had seen and heard while covering the invasion of Afghanistan – the marrow-deep racism; the casual bloodlust; the desperate need to belong to something, anything. To read this book is to contend with what the enterprise of industrial-scale violence can do to its most active participants, the many ways in which one emerges from so bloody a thing dislocated from who they used to be.”
— OMAR EL AKKAD, author of What Strange Paradise and American War
“Tempering harshness with tenderness and humour, Benjamin Hertwig’s Juiceboxers maps external and internal territories of conflict with sure grasp of character. A gripping addition to the canon of the literature of war and what comes after.”
— NABEN RUTHNUM, author of A Hero of Our Time
“Juiceboxers is not a coming-of-age story – it is a coming to grips story. The reader is lulled through desert days and nights where time is absent, but the bravado and bigotry of war isn’t. From the sandy hills and mountains of Afghanistan to the slushy streets of Edmonton, Hertwig’s poetic prose leaves us with a sense of hope . . . [Hertwig’s words] do not shy away from horror and healing.”
— NORMA DUNNING, author of Tainna and Annie Muktuk and Other Stories
“Juiceboxers is not just a great first novel, it’s a great any-time-in-your-career novel. I believe it will be recognized as one of Canada’s best novels of war. It has what Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Michael Herr’s Vietnam memoir Dispatches had: the boredom and terror of being a soldier in modern, highly mechanized warfare. Both those now-famous books more or less created a style to suit their subject, a way to bring it all uncomfortably close, close enough to feel and smell.”
— FRED STENSON, Alberta Views (Read full review)
“Juiceboxers is a fiercely honest portrait of young soldiers fighting a war Canada would rather forget and then discovering that it has followed them home. Benjamin Hertwig’s debut novel is an unflinching act of remembrance, a tale of brotherhood and prejudice, and a moving portrait of lives and friendships forged and torn apart.”
— THOMAS WHARTON, author of The Book of Rain and Icefields