Red Kayak

Brady is the main character of The Red Kayak and its narrator. The novel opens shortly after he's entered ninth grade, but the majority of the action takes place when he's just thirteen. In fact, Brady's formal graduation from middle school echoes the profound internal changes Brady undergoes over the course of the book; conscientious and caring from the start,Brady develops more complex and mature views on morality, friendship, and identity as a result of both the kayaking accident and his best friends' involvement in it.

Brady's heightened sense of personal responsibility at times verges on the obsessive; as the novel begins, Brady is still mining the past for evidence of his own guilt or innocence in Ben's death. The reasonsbehind thisconscientiousness lie in his family background and, especially, in his sister'sdeath. When Brady's parents temporarily split up after Amanda’s death, Brady spent long stretches of time living with his cousin Carl at a fire station, where he largely looked after himself. It also seems likely that the experience of losing a sibling at such a young age made Brady more sensitive than the average teenager to the seriousness of life and death; when Digger pressures Brady to smoke with him, Brady turns his friend down, saying that he had an uncle who died of lung cancer.