"Nineteen Hundred Days" by Florence Osmund

Ben Mattis, 12, and his sister Lucy, 6, live in rural Illinois, not far from Galena. Their home is isolated, and the two children are homeschooled, defined as mostly teaching themselves. Their mother works; their father, when he’s around, can usually be found drinking. 

One morning their father leaves, saying he has to help their mother at her job. They children don’t think much of it, until neither parent comes home that night. Ben feeds himself and his sister, and they wait. A neighbor comes by the next day, but neither Ben nor Lucy answer the knock. They don’t know what happened to their parents, but both children are terrified of landing in the hands of Child Protection Services (CPS), because Ben has talked to kids with that experience. 

 

They hide again when the neighbor, the sheriff and the CPS worker return. And Ben knows they need to flee to their aunt. And thus begins the journey of Nineteen Hundred Days by Florence Osmund. Added to the mystery of what’s happened to their parents are the artifacts Ben finds in the cellar while they’re hiding, artifacts which turn out to be worth more than a small fortune.

 

Florence Osmund

When they reach their aunt, they learn that she’s in the hospital. And here comes the dreaded CPS. It’s a coming-of-age story, a minor mystery story, and ultimately a story of tough love. (It also contains a notable amount of profanity.)

 

After three decades working for corporations and associations, Osmund retired to devote herself to full-time writing, Osmund has published several novels, including The Ring, They Called Me Margaret, Living with Markus, Regarding Anna, Red Clover, The Coach House, and Daughters, and the non-fiction book How to Write, Publish, and Promote a Novel. She lives in Illinois.

 

Nineteen Hundred Days is a hard story that the reader knows from the prologue will end well. The focus is on the 12-year-old Ben, the decisions he makes, and how he finally learns to grow up.

“Joey Flynn’s Extraordinary Tale” by Meghan White

J

oey Flynn has moved with his family from California to Oregon. His dad has a new job, and the family’s new house is in a remote area, not far from Multnomah Falls. Joey’s rather miserable; he’s left behind everything that’s familiar, including friends and school. 

One good thing about the new home is the nearby forest, perfect for an 11-year-old boy to explore. What he doesn’t expect to find is Zibbis, a roughly three-foot tall, well, something, like a racoon who walks around on two legs. Zibbis hands joy a silver calling card that reads “Special Agent Zibbis, Department of Children’s Needs and Emergencies.”

 

The strange creature doesn’t explain where he’s from, but Joey discovers his new friend is extremely resourceful (with a kangaroo-like pouch full of bubble gum soda and purple stones ideal for skimming across water, among other things). What Zibbis doesn’t say, or at least say immediately, is what his mission is. And the mission has a lot to do with Joey.

 

Meghan White

Joey Flynn’s Extraordinary Tale by Meghan White is the story of what happens to Joey and his new friend Zibbis during that first summer in Oregon. Joey is going to learn about trust, faith, and putting others before himself.

 

The short novel is White’s first published work. She says it began when her family lived in Oregon and her husband got an idea for an illustrated book, based on a character he’d drawn. She resisted the idea for years, until the family moved to Texas, where she finally wrote the story.

 

Joey Flynn’s Extraordinary Tale is reminiscent of the Glade series of novels by Martha Orlando. A mythical-like character appears to guide a troubled boy to an understanding of faith and self. We need more stories about children like Joey Flynn; Our children do, too.

Poets and Poems: Arran James Grant and "Mania"

You’ve heard of coming-of-age novels. British poet Arran James Grant may have written a coming-of-age poetry collection. 

As I was reading his recently published Mania, I kept thinking to myself that these are the poems of a young man. And they clearly are, with many of the 52 poems about love and relationships. But Mania is also a bit more than that. It’s a collection of poetry by a young man who knows he’s writing about the experiences of being a young man. The poems have a deliberateness, a self-consciousness that tells you they aren’t only poems about love but poems about looking back and understanding what’s happened. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"Stay" by Catherine Ryan Hyde

It’s the late spring of 1969. Fourteen-year-old Lucas Painter has taken to running in the woods near his small town. His running is something of an escape; his parents fight constantly. His older brother Roy is in the army in Vietnam, where the war is at its height. Lucas’s best friend Connor Barnes has a similar problem with his own parents, except they never fight. They never seem to talk to each other. 

One morning, while running in the woods, Lucas gets lost and discovers a cabin, a cabin seemingly guarded by two very large and threatening-looking dogs. He runs, the dogs give chase, and it’s a while before the frightened teen realizes that the dogs aren’t chasing him but actually running with him. The run with the dogs becomes a daily thing, until the day he finds them pacing the cabin porch and refusing to leave. Lucas looks in the window and sees an older woman in her bed, not moving. When his yelling doesn’t rouse her, he races home to call the police.

 

The woman is Zoe Dinsmore, a figure no one in town wants to talk about. She was involved in a tragedy years before Lucas was born, and the tragedy led to alcohol and drugs. She’s just tried to kill herself again. Lucas, on the advice of Zoe’s estranged daughter, tells Zoe he won’t take in her dogs if she tries again. 

 

Catherine Ryan Hyde

Zoe and Lucas become friends. When Connor begins to talk of suicide, Lucas introduces him to Zoe. And when Roy returns from Vietnam, addicted and seriously injured, Lucas manages another introduction. And somehow, all of these hurting people, grope toward helping each other.

 

Stay by Catherine Ryan Hyde is their story, told by Lucas looking back to that summer, the summer when everything changed. It’s a coming-of-age novel, and it’s also something more, a story of brokenness healing itself.

 

Hyde is the author of some 34 works of fiction, including novels for both adults and young people, children’s stories, and short story collections. She’s also written four non-fiction works. The best known of her novels is Pay It Forward, which was made into a movie and helped Hyde create the Pay It Forward Foundation, which she chairs. She’s a speaker, loves horseback riding, and in 2016 took a trekking vacation in the lower ranges of the Himalayas. Her next novel, Anton, is due to be published in December.

 

Stay is a moving, often heartbreaking story, a story of a boy growing up in a tumultuous time who has to decide what’s important in his life.

“Ordinary Grace” by William Kent Krueger

It’s the summer of 1961. Frank Drum is 13. He’s a preacher’s kid; his father is a Methodist minister but also handles the preaching for two other churches. With his parents, his 18-year-old sister Ariel, and his 11-year-old brother Jake, Frank lives in the town of New Bremen, Minnesota. It’s the kind of place where you can still get icy root beers at the drugstore’s soda fountain.

It’s a glorious summer. It also becomes the summer of five deaths. The summer when everything changed, the summer when life became fragile and uncertain.

The first death is a six-year-old boy, who would be called autistic today. He ignored or simply didn’t hear the train coming. The second is a homeless man, who seems to have died of natural causes. But it’s the next three deaths that strain the family and the town to the breaking point and beyond. And Frank and Jake are caught up in all of the deaths, as both observers and sometimes the ones who find the bodies and overhear what the adults are saying. Frank in particular knows and comes to understand far more than he should.

William Kent Krueger

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger, published in 2013, is a coming-of-age novel, but it’s also much more. It’s a mystery, it’s a romance, and it’s a tragedy. It’s a novel with links to the past, to secrets, to first loves, to bullies, and to class structure in small towns. It’s a novel about music and faith and God. And it’s a novel about grace, and just how awful grace can sometimes be.

Krueger has published 18 mystery novels in the Cork O’Connor series, set in the North Woods of Minnesota, and three standalone novels: Ordinary Grace, The Devil’s Bed, and This Tender Land. He’s received a number of awards and recognitions, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, the Friends of American Writers Prize, and the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His last nine novels were all New York Times bestsellers. Krueger lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Ordinary Grace builds slowly before it suddenly begins to accelerate and becomes almost impossible to put down. The characters are drawn exactly right. The turmoil experienced by a 13-year-old boy seems almost to have come from a lived experience. It’s a moving, sensitive, wonderful atory.

Related:

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger.

“A Whole Lot” by Bradley Wind

It’s the early 1980s. You’re 12 or 13 years old, a little small for your age, but there’s a world out there that desperately needs exploring. Like the old, decaying mansion where the murders happened. The new video arcade getting ready to open. And the treehouse you find, the one with the dirty magazines.

Abel Velasco is that 12- or 13-year-old, but his has not been a normal childhood. A mother institutionalized for the effects of drug abuse. A father who disappeared when he was a baby. An uncle who took him in but died in a freak accident. A series of foster homes, until finally he lands with his father’s sister, the one Abel calls Aunt Pigpie (and he’s being charitable). She’s abusive, although Abel avoids her wrath with a mention of a sale of junk food at the grocery store.

There’s one additional thing you should know about Abel. He has a form of autism. It manifests itself in his behavior – he has a photographic memory, can’t bear to be touched, likes and dislikes all kinds of smells and tastes, and sees number patterns everywhere. He loves the works of the philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. And he is as up-to-date on mathematical theory as any university professor in America.

Abel is the hero of A Whole Lot, the first novel by author Bradley Wind. It’s a story that pulls the reader in and doesn’t let go.

It’s a coming-of-age novel, yes, but it’s unlike any coming-of-age novel I’ve ever read. Wind has drawn characters – children and adults alike – who are recognizable and familiar (well, almost; I never knew an aunt like Aunt Pigpie). The characters often seem a New Jersey version of the people we find in Flannery O’Connor’s stories.

Bradley Wind

Wind is an artist and writer, a native Pennsylvanian. He’s worked as a toy designer for K’nex Industries and as an IT manager for Pearl S. Buck International. He’s currently the director of a child-focused non-profit organization.

What he’s done with Abel is something extraordinary, for we find ourselves inside of a mind that is brilliant and simultaneously normal and abnormal. And all the time the story has a backdrop of numbers, numbers theory, and mathematical patterns, because that is how Abel thinks and functions. And it is how Abel survives.

A Whole Lot is funny, moving, provocative, disturbing, suspenseful – and ultimately satisfying.

Top photograph by Ian L via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

James Calvin Schaap’s “Romey’s Place”

Lowell Prins and Romey Guttner are 13-year-olds about as different as night and day. And yet they are best friends, living on opposite sides of the small town of Easton, Wisconsin, close to the Lake Michigan shoreline. It’s the late 1950s, an era of relative stability when the middle class was still growing, church was a part of most people’s lives, and a boy’s summer was devoted to exploration, friends, picking beans, and pranks.

Lowell’s father is known as something of a Christian saint, involved in all things church, never raising his voice, never striking out physically. Romey’s father is rude, vulgar, heavy-handed (literally) with the discipline for his son and his wife. Lowell’s father works in a professional job in Easton; Romey’s father is on strike at a plant in the larger town of Brandon, some 10 miles away.

What happens with Lowell and Romey in that summer, and what happens with their families and the larger community, is the story of James Calvin Schaap’s novel Romey’s Place, first published in 1999 and reissued in 2007. It is a coming-of-age novel, but it is more than that – a meditation on adolescence, friendship, faith, loss, and fathers. And it is a novel that succeeds at all of these things.

Romey’s Place is far from being simply a nostalgic look backward at a time when life seemed simple and (for many of us) golden. It could have been easily that and nothing more. To those of us raised in that era, it is wonderfully familiar – looking for animals along streams and canals; wandering in the woods; discovering scary things to do; Bible Camp; trying to act 17 when you’re only 13 and largely failing.

James Calvin Schaap

But by weaving family violence and dysfunction and labor and union troubles through the story, the novel leaves nostalgia behind and instead becomes how two boys are rather suddenly forced to grow up, and the roles they play in the adult dramas unfolding around them. It is also about what two good friends learn from each other one summer that will shape them the rest of their lives.

Schaap in an emeritus professor of literature and writing at Dordt College in Sioux City, Iowa. He’s a novelist and short story writer, and has also written several devotional books. His most recent book is Reading Mother Teresa: A Calvinist looks lovingly at “the little bride of Christ.” He blogs at Stuff in the Basement.

Romey’s Place is one of those rare things, a “Christian novel” that transcends its genre and leaving its readers wiser and reflective.

Related:

My review of Schaap’s Finding Christmas.

Top photograph by Yinan Chen via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.