LIZZIE BRIGHT AND THE BUCKMINSTER BOY by Gary D. Schmidt

This is why I keep reading....Because every once in awhile a book comes along that changes me and becomes part of me forever. I'll always  remember who I was when I read it. I'll wish I had written it but I'll know I never could, though I'll draw inspiration and courage from it, for both writing and living.

Quick, ten books that have done this, and the age at which I read them: Anne of Green Gables (11). The Once and Future King (13). A Separate Peace (16). Dr. Zhivago (17). The Chosen (late 20s). The World According to Garp (30ish). The Prince of Tides (40ish). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (50ish). Cutting for Stone (60ish).

Add to this Honor Roll Gary D. Schmidt's Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, an award-winning 2004 children's book. It's based on a true tale of injustice, the kind that's hidden safely in the dusty history of every state until some writer shines a light on it and reminds us of how much oppression has scarred this "free" country of ours.

At first it's just the story of one boy, Turner Buckminster III, only son of a minister who's just moved his family to a small town about a century ago. Turner wants no part of Phippsburg, Maine. If he can't stay in Boston and play baseball with his friends, he'd prefer to just light out for the Territories, wherever and whatever they are. Instead he must endure the pressure of being the minister's son, the scorn and derision of the local boys who manage to make a fool out of him even at his beloved baseball, and the scolding of the  intolerant neighbors who see it as their duty to manage the lives of Turner and even his parents.

Lonely and resentful, Turner spends his time exploring the shores of the nearby tidal river, where he finds Lizzie Bright Griffin clamming in the mudflats, and a memorable friendship is born. Lizzie takes him to Malaga Island, where a small colony of poor outcasts--mostly black like Lizzie and her grandfather--have made their homes for years. For Turner it's a good place to be. Lizzie's exuberant spirit soothes his angry soul and gives him a reason to be glad he's alive.

Of course there's a but, embodied in the Dickensian Mr. Stonecrop, a self-righteous bully who holds most of the townspeople in his power. He informs Turner's father that he's expected to join the effort to rid Malaga of the undesirables who squat there so the island can be developed for tourism. Before long everyone's involved in the conflict, and more is at stake than the friendship of two children. Tensions escalate. Enemies fortify their corners and come out fighting, and innocent people are caught in the crossfire. Adult-sized tragedies ensue; don't give this book to a young child until you've read it yourself. Then, after you've grappled with the issues Turner must face, find a child you love enough to share difficult truths with and read this story together.

Schmidt is a master at creating both plot and character. Each chapter hooks us further into Turner and Lizzie's feelings, ratcheting up the tension as the story widens in scope. Most of the townspeople fit the stereotype of narrow-minded Christians, but individuals emerge to help Turner and surprise us. Turner's mother says little, but her sympathy for him and her disappointment in the husband she loves enrich the story. All the adults are shackled in ways they can't see. It is the free, oppressed, doomed people of Malaga Island who teach Turner how to live:

"A loud screeching of gulls from behind the pines, louder and louder, and then it was no longer gulls who were screeching but a pack of five, or four, or six, or who knows how many children flapping their arms and running up and down and back and forth, screeching and cackling, and then careening down upon them, cawing and laughing and thrashing up the water until they flopped down like a flock of swarming birds all come to roost....Two of them grabbed Turner's hands. `Fly with us!' cried one."

THE WEIRD SISTERS by Eleanor Brown

If you are a woman for whom reading is like breathing, only much more interesting, you will love Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters. The title refers to the three witches of Macbeth, though our heroines are quite normal young women. At least they will seem normal to readers raised in bookish families, who will revel in the love of reading that permeates the novel:

“She turned to look back into the living room, one dim light behind our father’s favorite sun-paled orange wing-back chair spreading shadows over the opened books that covered every surface despite her attempts to keep them orderly. Our family’s vices—disorder and literature—captured in evening tableau. We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sort of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate.”

Dad is a professor who speaks in Shakespearean quotes and who drew the names of his daughters—Rose, Bean (Bianca), and Cordy—from the plays. The sisters, now in their late twenties, have moved back home, ostensibly to help their mother through cancer treatment. The eldest, over-responsible Rose, a professor herself, has never left their small college town. She moves easily into the role of caretaker and overseer, soon realizing, to her annoyance, that her younger sisters are as much in need of care as her mother. Both carry secrets we are privy to long before the family: sophisticate Bean has been fired from her Manhattan job for  embezzling money to fund her extravagant lifestyle. Cordy, a hippie drifter who lives for the moment, has spent her twenties acquiring little but a carpe-diem attitude, a string of lovers, and now an accidental pregnancy she does not know what to do with.

Brown does a terrific job creating three distinct women who are both bound to each other and bound to drive each other crazy. After many false starts and unwise decisions, each eventually redefines her life. I think any woman will identify with at least one of the sisters. This is neither tragedy nor romance, but the ups and downs of ordinary women stumbling through ordinary life. Brown imbues the book with hope and humor as her characters become our friends--often in that exasperating way friends have of getting under your skin.

The book reads easily, but its point of view, a sort of omniscient first-person plural, can be confusing. At first you’ll try to figure out who's telling the story; everyone is described in third person, but with the pronoun “our”: our father, our Cordy. My advice is to just accept this technique and let yourself get lost in the story. 

If you enjoy audio books, Kirsten Potter’s reading is one of the best I’ve ever listened to. But now I have to buy the book in print so I can savor all the great passages about reading.

HOUSE OF PRAYER NO. 2 by Mark Richard

The rave reviews that led me to Mark Richard’s House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home were right. I read this poetic, addictive memoir in a day, lost in the story of a “special child” who grows up to be a writer. As a boy in southern Virginia, Mark’s spinal disabilities meant spending months away from his family in Richmond’s Crippled Children’s Hospital (they really called it that!) encased in plaster. Neither the pain nor the difficulty walking ever left him, yet he never whines or wishes for a different life or uses his disability as a reason not to try anything; his stoicism is amazing.

As a young man he leaves college and his family to work on fishing boats and live in squalor, committing most of the sins of youth. Finally he meets the writing teacher and the woman who will help him find  purpose. He becomes a husband, father, and successful writer. Eventually he returns to his childhood home to help rebuild a church--the House of Prayer of the title--and rejoin a community where he had once belonged.

The details of Richard’s wandering life are enough to keep you turning pages, but it’s the beauty of his words that makes this book a keeper. The unusual use of “you” for “I” and the nautical metaphors in the following passage are typical of his poetic style:

“You are lost at sea in New York City, headphones on, Bible tract in your back pocket, the seafaring novel roaring in your head, the heaving concrete, headlong black foaming ocean, a pitched deck where men hold on for life in the shadows, a Master somewhere on the upper deck, unseen but seeing, seeing you, no urgency, no destination, no end to the night, you sail under reefed sail, a stranger pulls you by your collar from stepping in front of an express bus on Fifty-seventh Street.”

What also struck me about this book is its emotional tone. I felt as if I were sitting at a kitchen table with the author as he spun out the stories of his life. In spite of the pain he suffered and the mistakes he made, there is never a hint of self-pity or sentimentalism. Under all his words flows a stream of understated faith and a sense of humbleness I found very moving. I’d like to meet this guy.

(For more analysis of Richard’s style, see my style blog.)

THE PIG DID IT by Joseph Caldwell

Aaron McCloud has come to Ireland to grieve for his lost love. Well, not exactly lost. Having generously chosen to offer himself to Phila Rambeaux, a student in his writing class who came to his party “wearing a dress of black silk with orange and blue geometrics that looked like intergalactic debris left behind by a failed space probe,” Aaron has been soundly ignored, if not dismissed outright. His childhood home on the west coast of Ireland, in the company of an almost-beloved aunt, is the place, he thinks, to mourn:


“His stretch of beach would be deserted. His solitude would be inviolate, his loneliness unobserved and unremarked except by the sea itself. There would, of course, be gulls, there would be curlews. He would hear their shrieks and watch the curve of their spread wings riding a current of air so rarefied that only a feather could find it. Perhaps there would be cormorants and, if he was lucky, a lone ship set against the horizon. There would be squalls and storms, crashing water, and thundering clouds. Lightning would crack the sky. Winds would lash the cliffs and—again, if he was lucky—rocks would be riven and great stones thrown into the sea. Then he, Aaron McCloud, would walk the shore unperturbed, his solitude, his loneliness, a proud and grieving dismissal of all that might intrude on his newly won sorrows.”

Except for the pig. The one that attaches itself to Aaron before he can begin his mourning and then keeps digging up things that interrupt the process, like the skeleton in his aunt’s garden that revives a centuries-long feud among two families and a sexy swineherd. And a sea that seems determined to swallow him. And a secret passage in his aunt’s cottage on the cliff. And a couple of Keystone gardai. And some Guinness, actually a whole lot of Guinness. And Irish darts and wakes and beautiful blarney….It’s hard for Aaron to devote himself to serious grief-wallowing, “to deepen the lines on his forehead, to implant a mournfulness into his eyes that would forever silence the joyful and inspire shame in the indifferent” when there’s just so much distraction.

Part of what makes this book so hilarious is the contrast between the earnest inanity of Aaron and the pseudo-loftiness of the writing style. You can read it just as a funny story, but you can also see it as a skillful parody of the “literary” novel, as in this passage:

“It surprised Aaron that the slam of the screen door, the quick clap, the low thrum, didn’t bring on some Proustian recall of his boyhood summers there, an assault of high-clouded days, of rabbits and clams and apples with worms, of bare feet and cow pies and thistles, and of thundering storms with jagged lightning piercing again and again the tortured breast of the sea. But then he quickly remembered: In his childhood there had been no screen door.”

I’m a lover of poetic novels, the kind where long sentences full of lovely images and powerful emotions tumble over each other. I’ll probably never read such a book again without yearning for the pig to make an appearance. Whatever brand of humor you appreciate, this book will make you laugh out loud. Caldwell says he wrote the Pig trilogy because his work was getting too dark, and he wanted to find the humor in life. I’m so glad he did. And now I’m off to order Book Two, The Pig Comes to Dinner.

THE SHERLOCKIAN by Graham Moore

My husband got me this when I couldn't stop raving about the brilliant new Masterpiece Theater depiction of Sherlock Holmes in today's London, and because I love seeing new takes on old stories. Moore's absorbing story is another creative spinoff with two alternating narratives happening a century apart. Both are based on true stories. One thread, set in 1900, follows Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker as they search for both a bomber threatening Conan Doyle and a serial murderer who marries and then murders young suffragists. This takes place during "the great hiatus," when Conan Doyle had seemingly killed off Holmes and as a result found himself quite unpopular. In the second story a modern-day Sherlockian seeks the killer of a fellow Baker Street Irregular who may have found a long-sought Conan Doyle diary. Both plots rapidly thicken, and gradually each enlightens the other, leading to a wonderfully satisfying conclusion. A perfect antidote to post-Christmas blahs. (In my Kindle version, a must-read Author's Note comes before the text, but you'll want to read it afterward--and possibly continue exploring the story of Conan Doyle, as I am going to do in Julian Barnes' Arthur and George.)