Eric Walters Ian is a sixteen year old high school student who is failing a course so he needs to go to a homeless shelter and put in his service hours or else he will fail. While going there he is saved from a bunch of thugs by a former soldier (peacekeeper) / (currently homeless) named Jacques. Ian wants to know more about Jacques’ past as a soldier. He finds out that Jacques was part of a genocide act in Rwanda where over 800 000 people were slaughtered.
Jacques was one of the many who witnessed, lived and feared this act of genocide. Ian doesn’t know very much about the Rwanda genocide act so for a few nights he stays up to look up that terrifying moment in history. He learns about the story of a boy named Jacob and his whole family was murdered and how he had is left arm cut off by a machete. Also, he learns that one death to just a single victim is a tragedy but death to hundreds of thousands of victims is just a statistic.
In this book Ian is realizing how much pain soldiers had to go through and how homeless people aren’t worthless but they are worth less than him. Ian gets taken to the dirtiest and poorest parts of his city to learn about the homeless and also to find more and more about Jacques. In Shattered the author Eric Walters brings a lot to the plate with some really important issues.
