The Boy on the Porch. By
Sharon Creech. Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins. $16.99.
The Great Unexpected. By
Sharon Creech. Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins. $6.99.
The League. By Thatcher
Heldring. Delacorte Press. $15.99.
Novels for preteens and
young teenagers tend to be in the action/adventure mode most of the time,
whether directed at boys or girls. They may be set in the past or future, in
this world or an alternative one, but they are generally plot-driven rather than
character-driven and tend to move ahead at a steady pace, if not a frantic one.
Sharon Creech’s books, though, are an exception. She writes novels that are
something like toned-down, detuned adult books of the type focused on character
interactions in semi-realistic settings, and she does this consistently – as in
The Boy on the Porch and The Great Unexpected (the latter
originally published last year and now available in paperback). Both these
books have improbable setups that Creech uses to explore the possible emotional
reactions of fairly realistic (although generally one-dimensional) characters.
Believe in the characters and you will be pulled into the novels and pulled
along with them; find them lacking and the plot disconnections will leave you disappointed.
The Boy on the Porch, for example,
starts with the depositing on the veranda of a rural American home of a boy who
is about six years old; the young owners of the house, John and Marta, know
only that someone will be back for him sometime (a poorly written note says
so). The boy can tell them nothing – he is mute – but he soon wends his way
into their hearts, becoming so integral to their thoughts and feelings that
they dread the inevitable day when someone will return to claim him. The rural
lifestyle portrayed here is quite idyllic and idealized, and the obvious
questions about why John and Marta simply take the boy in and worry about his
eventual departure, instead of going to authorities or taking any action
outside their small homestead, are glossed over. All this is typical of Creech,
whose taste for realism extends only so far. The boy turns out to have
considerable artistic talent, and he has something almost mystical in common
with the couple’s silent beagle and a cow that they found tied to their fence:
John and Marta seem to draw misplaced characters to themselves. But the boy,
Jacob, seems more a symbol than a full-fledged individual throughout the book,
and in fact John and Marta do as well: readers who get involved in the story
will respond emotionally to it, especially to the tear-jerker ending, but the
book has a certain obviousness and self-righteousness as it explores questions
of right and wrong. Still, it does
explore them, and with some subtlety, which is more than books for preteens and
young teens usually do.
Creech also mixes the
believable with the far-fetched in The
Great Unexpected, which starts with a boy falling out of a tree onto
protagonist Naomi Deane, who is the primary narrator of a book that in part
explores the ups and downs of Naomi’s relationship with her best friend, Lizzie
Scatterding, and in part is a mystery involving Ireland, to which the scene
shifts periodically (and rather jarringly). This book is written in a mixture
of styles that takes some getting used to – it can be hard to tell when a
chapter begins if it follows the one before immediately, or if several weeks
have passed. The book is also filled with alliterative names that some may find
charming and others irritating: Crazy Cora, “the dapper Dingle Dangle man,” and
so on. The underlying mystery of the book – that is, the mystery of the boy in
the tree – requires an eventual uniting of the two story lines, the one
involving Naomi and Lizzie and the other involving the Irish estate that shows
up periodically. There should be a sense of wonder within the realism here –
that is clearly what Creech is striving for – but the book does not hang
together particularly well, largely because of its confusing structure and also
because of a few too many narrative tricks, such as having the two women in
Ireland talk in what seems like a crazy way that turns out at the end to make
sense. Whether this plays fair with the reader will depend on whether that
reader is charmed by Creech’s quirkiness or comes to find it tiresome. Creech
certainly writes stories that are gentler and more heartfelt than most for a
preteen and young-teenage audience, and as such are a welcome relief from
formulaic adventure tales. But she has formulas of her own, and readers will
not necessarily find them as sweetly thoughtful as Creech obviously intends
them to be.
Thatcher Heldring’s The League is a far more typical tale
for this age group, and a far more boy-oriented one. It is the usual “sports
make the man” story, with the emphasis being on the right kind of sport, specifically with American football being good,
strong and manly and golf being some sort of lesser activity. Wyatt Parker
wants to play football, both because it will make him a tougher “real man” and
because it will impress his next-door neighbor, Evan, who naturally has eyes
only for the town’s star quarterback. Wyatt’s parents, though, are significant
obstacles, with their droning on about how people get hurt in football; so they have signed Wyatt up for golf camp, where
he emphatically does not want to go. Then Wyatt’s older brother, Aaron, drops
hints – which Wyatt picks up on – about some sort of secret football program,
and eventually lets Wyatt know (dramatically) that it is called the League of
Pain, and that Wyatt can join if he dumps golf camp. So of course Wyatt does
that, lying to the camp about needing to cancel because, he says, he is going
to Space Camp instead. And of course he then has to lie to his parents, too
(Evan, however, thinks the idea of Wyatt playing football is cool). And so
Wyatt gets into a cascade of lies, exposing considerable angst in the process:
“I wished I could run right through Mom and keep going. I was so sick of doing
whatever anybody told me to do when other people just did whatever they wanted.
In fact, this made me want to play football even more. …I wanted to kick a hole
in the wall. It wasn’t enough to tell me what to say, Mom also had to tell me
how to say it.” Well, of course sports, specifically football, are here
portrayed as a fine, socially acceptable outlet for this sort of aggressiveness.
And Wyatt gets subjected to more and more problems – for instance, when his
parents give him an old, worn pair of golf shoes that his father used to own
and says he kept for 30 years so he could pass them on. The characters in this
book are so unpleasant that it makes perfect sense for the League of Pain to
have teams called the Morons and the Idiots. Obviously Wyatt is going to get
caught (he does), and obviously his clueless (and really rather mean-spirited)
parents are going to punish him and make him miserable (they do), and obviously
Aaron is going to get in trouble as well (he does). And obviously nobody is
going to say that football itself is anything but wonderful (nobody does). The League, a (++) book, is so
unthinking an endorsement of the American version of macho sports that it could
almost be funny – except that there is nothing amusing in the attitudes it endorses
and expresses through Heldring’s cast of smarmy, thoroughly unpleasant
characters.
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