A Thing with Feathers: Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt

So my father came home with his lunch pail in his hand and a bandage on his face and the last check he would ever see from Culross Lumber, and he looked at my mother and said, "Don't you say a thing." Mom jumped up from the table and brought over the plate she'd been keeping warm in the oven.

"It's not all dried out, is it?" he said.

"I don't think so,' Mom said.

"You don't think so," he said, and reached for the ketchup. He smeared it all over his meat loaf. Took a red bite. "We're moving," he said. "To Maysville. Upstate." Another red bite. Ballard Paper Mill has a job and Ernie Eco says he can get me in."

Ernie Eco," said my mother quietly.

"So it will begin all over again. The bars, gone all night, coming home when you're--"

"Which one of your sons will it be this time?" my mother said.

My father looked at me.

In Doug Swietock's own words, his father is a jerk, his oldest brother, somewhere in Vietnam, is an unwelcome subject, his older brother Chris, who steals his only joy, his autographed Joe Pepitone cap, is a jerk, and, as he ruefully admits to himself, he's well on his way to becoming one himself. Stuck in a tiny bedroom with his abusive brother in a house he names "The Dump," "stupid Maysville" has no promise for Doug, and his defensive attitude gets him in hot water at school right away.

But Maysville has its own promise, in the form of an understanding librarian who shows him the town's chief claim to fame, a first edition of Audubon's Birds of America. Doug is arrested by the plate on view, the Arctic Tern, and he feels a sudden connection to the bird and an unexpected urge to draw it himself, which Mr. Powell encourages. A chance meeting with a girl, Lil Spicer, brings a deepening friendship and a job as Saturday delivery boy for Spicer's Deli.

As Doug experiences developing relationships with the customers he sees each Saturday, his confidence grows, helping him to accept the encouragement of teachers at Maysville Junior High, where he overcomes his reading problem and discovers his abilities in math and science. Despite the open cruelty of his father, who has his chest tattooed with "Mama's Baby" for backing up his abused mother, Doug begins to see that there are better things ahead for him than following his father's path.

In Maysville there are a rush of personalities and experiences--the class study of Jane Eyre, Mrs. Windemere, the crusty old playwright who is turning the novel into a stage play and shares her weekly carton of ice cream with him, Mr. Ballard, the town's chief employer and beneficent dictator, whose summer picnic baseball trivia quiz Doug wins and who makes him a sort of protege, Mr. Powell, who introduces him to the meaning as well as the composition of art, even the coming Apollo moon landing which, with Audubon's birds, becomes the novel's central symbol.

Newbery author Gary Schmidt (for his companion book The Wednesday Wars) almost overloads this novel with the events and characters which together move Doug Swietock from proto-loser to winner, some of them bordering on the improbable, but which Schmidt ties together so compellingly that they seem improbably inevitable. Character and setting are so interwoven that the overlapping strands of plot build to a conclusion which leaves Doug Swietock grounded in a hard reality but one still with room for hope, okay for now.

A moving story which is hard to put down and harder to forget. Gary Schmidt's Okay for Now (Clarion, 2011) is forthcoming April 5.

Unto the Least of These: Martin de Porres--The Rose in the Desert by Gary D. Schmidt

Anna carried the baby into the cool dark of the cathedral. But when the priest unwrapped him, he frowned. "Is the child's father Spanish?" he asked.

Anna's heart beat quickly.

"And you are African?" he said. Anna nodded.

The priest frowned again. The baby's father was a royal conqueror. His mother was a slave.

"Who is this child?"

"He is a rose in the desert," said Anna.

Martin's mother struggled to raise him and his sister in deep poverty in sixteenth century colonial Lima.

Hunger lived in their home. Illness was their companion.

But even there, there was compassion. Martin's father took him into his household in Ecuador, saw to his education, and took him to a cirujano to learn the skills of healing and care, and soon his abilities began to amaze those whom he helped. One man whose grave wounds Martin healed gave him lemon seeds, and the tree that grew amazingly produced fruit in the first season and continued to bear the year around.

"Who is this strange boy," the neighbors asked.

Back in Lima as a young man, Martin presented himself for the brothers of the Monastery of the Holy Rosary.

"You are not of pure blood. You can never be a priest," they said.

But Martin simply requested a position as servant, and while he swept and cared for sick and hurt animals in the country round, his fame as a healer spread. Not only did Martin cure and tame the stray dogs in the area, but he also used his skills to cure the people, some in seemingly miraculous ways, until stories of Martin's powers took on legendary qualities. His lemon and orange trees bloomed and bore fruit all year, and the bread he brought to feed the poor never seemed to be gone until all were fed. Some even said they had seen him walking with angels. By the time he closed his dark eyes for the last time in 1639, Martin de Porres was venerated by churchmen, nobles, and poor alike.

Noted author Gary Schmidt and artist David Diaz have combined their considerable talents in a story of service and compassion in their forthcoming Martin de Porres: The Rose in the Desert (Clarion Books, 2012). Schmidt's narrative is lyrical, with repeated phrases which become more meaningful as the account progresses, and David Diaz's illustrations are lustrous and primitive in their power. Together the two build a powerful story of compassion, redemption, and caring which resonates with people of every faith and ethic. "A visual—and, it must be said, spiritual—delight," says Kirkus, and in their starred review, Booklist adds, "Schmidt's telling, touching in its simplicity, is well matched with Diaz's exceptional artwork, which is bold and referential in equal parts."

Gary Schmidt is a Newbery Honor, Michael Printz, and National Book Award honoree (for The Wednesday Wars, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, (Readers Circle (Laurel-Leaf)) and Okay for Now. David Diaz received the Caldecott Award for his illustrations in Eve Bunting's Smoky Night.

Starcrossed: Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt

I got on the bus and Joseph got on behind me, and Mr. Haskell looked past me and said, "You're the kid who has a kid, aren't you?" and Joseph stopped dead on the bus steps. "I couldn't believe it when Mr. Canton told us. Aren't you a little young?"

Joseph turned around and got off the bus.

"Hey, If you want to walk, it's no skin off my nose. Two miles that way. And--What do you think you're doing?"

That part was to me, because I got off the bus too.

"You're nuts," said Mr. Haskell. "It's twenty-one degrees out there." He closed the door.

The bus was nothing but rising exhaust down the road.

Joseph took off his backpack. It was pretty much empty, since he hadn't gotten any books yet.

"Give me some of your stuff," he said. We took off, two miles, and it wasn't any twenty-one degrees.

Jack is twelve, an only child, a long, cold bus ride from the local middle school, and his family, committed to sustainable organic farming in rural Maine, only attend the local church twice a year, Christmas Eve and Easter morning. So Jack is quietly glad when Joseph comes to be his foster brother. But Joseph Brooks is damaged goods, obviously horribly abused by his father, and yet a father himself, with his newborn child and her mother taken away by her family. Wracked with grief over the loss of Madeline and baby Jupiter, his only real family, Joseph has tried to choke a juvenile officer and refused to speak in three months of juvenile custody.

For Joseph, school is hard, and the school bus unbearable.

Joseph trusts no one, seemingly unreachable. But when Jack's father gives him the job of milking one of their cows, Rosie, the cow somehow seems to trust him.

The next morning, when the three of us went out to the big barn to milk, Joseph went to Rosie first, and he reached out and rubbed her rump again. And Rosie mooed and swayed her behind, and told Joseph she loved him.

"I don't need the milk," said my father. "But she needs you to milk her."

That was the first time I saw Joseph smile. Sort of.

Jack counts the smiles as he and Joseph slowly begin to become friends and then, in their way, brothers, trudging two miles together to and from school, milking in the barn, gradually feeling free to throw shovelsful of snow at each other, and one day Joseph finally laughs. Joseph finds two teachers--a math teacher who begins to teach him trigonometry, and a gym coach who gives Joseph a group of kids to teach rope-climbing. He even begins to tease Jack, calling him "Jackie" just to get him riled. And Jack defends him against the kids at school who call him "Psycho."

"I had his back and he had mine."

And the day the pond freezes and Jack's parents skate and build a bonfire, Joseph tells his whole story and how he is determined someday to find Maddie and baby Jupiter.

But just as Joseph's precarious trust is beginning to take root, he learns that Madeline died in childbirth and that her parents are determined to have Jupiter adopted. To make his pain worse, Joseph, as the surviving parent, is asked to sign the adoption papers. In an emotional state as cold as outer space, Joseph's connections to his foster family fracture like the new ice on the pond, and he heads for the nearby town where the baby is being fostered, determined to see her. Jack's family set out, again in the snow, to find Joseph and bring him home. They find him in front of the house of the social worker who is keeping Jupiter, and although by court order she cannot let him see her, she gives him a photo of his daughter and promises to tell her about her father someday.

But Joseph's dark past proves not even to be past when his own crazed father shows up and takes him away at gunpoint into a snowstorm.

Two-time Newbery author Gary D. Schmidt's Orbiting Jupiter (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2015) tells the tragic story of a character seemingly born under a bad star. Related by Jack, there is only spare dialogue in this novel, the narration unfolding mostly in Jack's first-person thoughts as he counts up Joseph's smiles, the last one when he sees his daughter Jupiter's picture. Joseph's story--one of his own father, whose love is selfishly twisted, and his own love for his daughter--leads to a conclusion that is not one that readers will welcome or would have wanted. It is what it is, sadly, But there is for Jack's family and Jupiter a foreshadowed and redemptive ending that affirms the power of family love that can be lasting.

No one writes more movingly and honestly about adolescent boys than Schmidt, and he has upheld his standing as a premier writer of young adult fiction in this beautiful, heartbreaking but bravely life-affirming novel.

Schmidt's earlier Newbery Honor-winning novels are Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy and The Wednesday Wars, and he is also the author of Okay for Now, a National Book Award finalist.

It's That Time Again: National Book Award Finalists Are Named

The finalists in the prestigious National Book Awards for young people's literature have been announced, accompanied by more than the usual drama produced by an unprecedented comedy of errors.

Franny Billingsley, Chime. (Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)

Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy. (Marshall Cavendish)

Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again. (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books) .

Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now. (Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) (See my prepublication review here.

The drama occurred when there was an error in reporting one of the titles. Apparently the name of the book Chime by Franny Billingsley was misunderstood, resulting in the pre-announcement notification of Lauren Myracle as a finalist for her highly-reviewed book Shine (Amulet Books, 2011). For three days Myracle, a notable writer of young adult fiction, had to keep what she thought was biggest news of her career a secret until the formal announcement. Shortly after her book was publicly announced as one of five finalists in her division, word spread that Billingsley's book was the intended honoree. Myracle deserves my unofficial Literary Good Sport Award of the Year for her grace in dealing with this disappointment, even declining a short-lived (and then withdrawn) offer to be included in what would then be six finalists! Lauren Myracle proved herself a real winner in this altogether strange course of events.

The 2011 winners in all classes--Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature--will be announced at the gala awards dinner, hosted by John Lithgow, on November 16. I will report the results at that time.