Curtis, Christopher Paul. Bud, not Buddy

Some brief administrative things, first of all:

A shout-out to Paul Acampora, author of Defining Dulcie, a YA book that's available now. Paul answered some questions for me for that emergency request I posted a couple weeks back. Thank you, Paul!

I'm delighted to learn of the existence of the Dewey blog.

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Bud, not Buddy reminds me of Bucking the Sarge. The main characters of both are smart, philosophical types, caught in bad situations for long enough that they've learned that adults don't usually say what they mean and can't usually be trusted; they both have yet to learn that cynicism is not the same thing as wisdom, though one can't really blame them for learning that cynicism is usually the safest way to go. This book is set during the depression, 1937 or so. Bud Caldwell's mother died when he was six; in the four years since, he's been in and out of foster homes, which culminates in an experience so bad that he ends up locked in a shed and stung by a nest of hornets. He runs away to try to find his father, who he's sure is the Herman E. Calloway on the fliers his mother had-- the Herman E. Calloway who heads a string of jazz bands and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, some 120 miles away from Flint.

It's a smart book, a good book; a better book, I think, than Bucking the Sarge, though they're both good, and though it doesn't exactly motivate me to squeals of glee. What I like about it is that it balances on that edge between plucky optimistic "Just be good and everything will be okay" and the really depressing "You're in a terrible situation, and nothing you can do will change that." The Great Depression is pretty horrible, and there are lots of people whose circumstances aren't going to improve any time soon; and if Bud manages to come out ahead, it's as much because he's lucky and willing to disregard rules as because he's smart and brave. I think that's really the only way you can be honest about suffering in a children's book that children will actually willingly read; if children read for wish-fulfilment , then books about things like the Great Depression are going to smell boring and moralistic. But with a character like Bud, who is resourceful, and not a goody-two-shoes, and for whom things work out okay in the end... it's a lot easier to take. And the book touches on labor unions and race relations in a way that's age appropriate and feels natural within the context of the story.

Good book. Not dazzling, perhaps, but my standards are high. ;)