Family Secrets: Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything In It by Sundee Frazier

A kid with a scientific mind--even while doing his chores--Brendan Buckley begins to wonder about dust.

"I stopped thinking about Khalfani and riding my bike, and even Grampa Clem. And I definitely wasn’t thinking about finishing any chore. I went straight to my computer and got on the Internet, where I typed in the search question “What is dust?”

Sixty-seven million, nine hundred thousand results came up.

I had no idea there would be so much out there about dust, but that’s the thing about asking questions: They often lead to surprises, and they always lead to more questions."

Still sad over his Grampa Clem's death, ten-year-old Brendan's questions about the science of rocks and minerals lead him to investigate an exhibit at the mall. As it often does in science and in life, serendipity takes a hand and leads him to the display of Ed DuBose, president of the local rockhounds' club, and Brendan suddenly realizes that Ed is the white grandfather his mother will never talk about. With a white mom and black father, Brendan has never really given serious thought to being biracial, but he has always wondered what happened to his mom's father, whom she will only say is "gone."

Feeling the loss of his other grandfather, Brendan is drawn to this gruff old man who shares his prominent ears and his love for mineralogy, and without telling his mother, he resolves to visit Ed and find some answers to his family's long estrangement. What he finds, like his Google search on dust, turns up some surprises which Brendan has to accept and many questions which he has to find the courage to ask his new found grandfather and his own mother.

Biracial children, living as they do on the cusp of our racial ambiguities, often live with questions that the rest of us would rather leave unspoken. Brendan's honest attempts to get at the heart of his severed family's secrets pulls no punches with the reader as piece by piece he puts together the evidence he needs. In human relations as well as in science there are often variables. Brendan learns that his mother has never forgiven her father for cutting off all contact, even with her own dying mother, but he also senses that Ed, who teaches him about driving and takes him on an expedition to find "Thunder Eggs," deeply regrets his separation from his daughter and grandson.

"What am I?" Brendan writes in his "Book of Big Questions," and in Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It, the summer before sixth grade is one in which Brendan learns about much more than rock science.

To the Bone: Bone by Bone by Bone by Tony Johnston

Best known for her whimsical books for young readers, Tony Johnston has written a book aimed best at young adult readers, her 2007 novel, Bone by Bone by Bone. "I am haunted by my father," she says in her foreword, in explanation of why she wrote this semi-autobiographical novel about those "innocent-mean times" of the 1950's in the deep South.

Main character David Church is nine as the novel opens, a motherless and only child of Dr. Franklin Church who grows up in a house which has sheltered six generations. The kitchen door frame shows penciled heights and ages as far back as his great-grandmother, now nearly 100 years old, who tries to rule the household from her bed upstairs. David both reveres and fears his father, who installed a yellowed skeleton, scientifically labeled, beside his crib so that David could begin to follow him into a medical career from the cradle.

But even so, David is his own man. When he meets up with Malcolm Deeter, age 8, Negro and costumed in his mother's bedsheet for trick or treat, he sees in his sparkling eyes a kindred spirit. Dr. Church snatches the sheet off Malcolm's head and throws it in a trash can. "Jesus Christ, boy! You can't wear that! he shouts, dragging David away. "He can't be your friend. He's a n-----."

Despite his father's warning that he'd shoot any n----- who came in his house, it is "friendship at first sight" for David and Malcolm. They play together whenever they can escape adult eyes. They make a mud tar baby and play out the story, they dabble in the murky waters of Jesus Pond, tell ghost stories in the graveyard, invent a secret code, and discover a cave where, over a campfire meal of swiped hot dogs, they decide to become blood brothers. David even teaches the names of all the human bone he knows to Malcolm. Together at Miss Grace's, who doesn't seem to care if they are different colors, they earn shiny half-dollars doing chores and search surreptitiously for the severed arm of her Confederate great-granddaddy reputedly hidden somewhere in her house.

It is an outwardly idyllic boyhood, but David is unable to reconcile the two sides of his father--a doctor who gently bathes and consoles a dying patient with small talk about their own childhood games and a man who keeps a shotgun loaded with rock salt to shoot at any cat who violates his yard, a father who shares birthday banana splits and yet is involved with Klan doings in the countryside around. David is torn between love and hate for the father he can't understand. When his father turns a drunken old black handyman, called "the Mole Man," away at Christmas, David defies him by taking the man a plate of food. Then, during one of their now rare meetings, David and Malcolm discover the old man lynched, a dead mole crammed into his mouth and a sign, ONE LESS N-----, around his neck.

David knows he has to choose. It is his father's way or his own. David begins by deciding that he will not follow his father's orders to prepare for medical training. Then, on a Sunday, the day after his thirteenth birthday, a Klan Klavalcade of local men ends with the town's white drunk leading an attack on Malcolm. When David tries to shelter Malcolm inside the house, his father, true to his word, fires his shotgun at Malcolm just as David moves to shield him. David realizes that he will never know if his father thought the gun was loaded with rock salt or buckshot and knows that he will never really be his father's son again.

Bone by Bone by Bone received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Booklist and appeared on several lists of noted books for 2007. However, perhaps because of its honest portrayal of brutality, the authentic language of the time, and perhaps the knowledge that its readership would be limited by these factors, it did not win any major awards. For the right readers, however, this book, although like Huckleberry Finn a work of fiction, stands as an eyewitness account of its time which deserves to be read, discussed, and remembered by those who did not grow up in that time but live in its shadow.