“The Sin Eater” by Gary Schmidt

Cole and his father have moved to the Albion, New Hampshire home of Grandpa and Grandma Emerson, Cole’s maternal grandparents. Cole’s mother died from cancer sometime earlier, and his father decides it’s best to live where Cole’s mother was born and raised. His father has not come to terms with his wife’s death; it’s almost as if passing time has made the loss even greater. 

Cole’s not long at his new home when he hears the story of the Sin Eater, an old Welsh legend that seemed to have been lived by a local man. The Sin Eater collects a person’s sins, bakes them into a loaf of bread, and then eats the bread completely. Or so the legend goes. Cole is skeptical; it doesn’t sound particularly Christian to him. But there is a real connection to man who supposedly died in a farmhouse fire decades previously, and to several unmarked graves in the family plot on the Emerson farm, the same plot where his mother’s buried.

 

While his father spends most of his time in “the hired man’s room” above the kitchen, Cole becomes part of his grandparents’ daily life. He feels his mother’s loss as deeply as his father, but Cole has more of his mother in him, and not only his looks. He makes friends, he works the farm with his grandfather, he attends church, and he begins life at a new school. His father seems to be increasingly a ghost in the family, as if he were slowly vanishing with each passing day.

 

Gary Schmidt

The Sin Eater by young adult Gary Schmidt tells Cole’s story, and it is alternately tragic, sad, hysterically funny, and heartwarming. Like life. And sometimes it is all those things at the same time. Schmidt has a gift for characterization, and not only the main characters. And the stories his characters tell had me laughing out loud and wiping away tears, a reminder of the importance of stories in how we understand ourselves and our families. 

 

Schmidt, a professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is the author of numerous young adult novels. He’s received two Newbery Awards, for Lizzie Bright and the Buckminister Boy (2005) and The Wednesday Wars (2008). Okay for Now (2011) was a National Book Award finalist. The Sin Eater was published in 1996. He received his B.A. in English from Gordon College and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

The Sin Eater is a wonderful story, full of humor, tragedy, pain, pathos, and life. You’ll fall in love with Cole’s grandparents and their friends, and you’ll find in Cole a boy determined deal with what life throws at him and keep going.

 

Some Monday Readings

Dark Tunnels and Moral Beacons - Bari Weiss at The Free Press.

The Government Spends Millions to Open Grocery Stores in Food Deserts. The Real Test is Their Survival – Molly Parker at The Daily Yonder.

 

How Did British Politicians React to America’s Attempts at Independence? Rather Poorly! – Sonja Anderson at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

Conversation is an Art: Remembering Roger Scruton – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.