Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy Book

Alright...I have so much to say about this book...this is a winner, a really good book. Excellent. My first Printz Award book for this class. More soon.

Okay..Here's the "more soon" part. This book won the Printz Award, and I really like how they describe their criteria for literary excellence and quality on their website by what it is not. For example, a book is not quality simply by being popular. Although, of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. This book does not look to me like it was/is a popular read. But, it is quality.

The characters in this book are delicioulsy detailed and their relationships are real and engaging. The Maine breeze is a character itself in this book, as the setting takes on a whole dimension of life and growth in itself. The breeze is described in every momentous scene of the book and can be "like a cat awaking for a bowl of milk" to "solemn" when Turner's father dies. It steals the gold from the maple trees and the silver from the aspens or it just slinks away. It carries news up and down the street. It scatters old leaves around the foundations of the house where the people were forced to leave. It lends a special eye to scenes, revealing secrets of the moment the reader might otherwise have overlooked, almost like a hidden narrator. As I have just begun reading The Thief Lord for the Batchelder, I can see a deep parallel in how they both use the setting as an engaging, developing character in their stories. In conjunction with great characters and great character development, that appeals to me a lot.

The friendship between Lizzie and Turner is so real and memorable it haunts you, as it does Turner, with her voice coming back to meet his when he is back out at sea with the whales. This is among the best descriptions of friendship I have read. It lasts you.

As you read this book, you are on a journey of discovering who you, as Turner Buckminster are, who your father is, who your friends are and aren't, what your life will be determined by. It is a very existential read. You look for secrets in this book..big ones,like the secret to the meaning of life Who is Turner's father on the inside? What does the whale know? What will we each person in this life be determined by?

You "light out for the territories" when you take this book in your hands just as Turner does when he takes The Origin of Species into his.

The knowledge in his father's eyes, in the whale's eyes is very deep, made deepr by the whole telling of the story behind it. It is the profound knoweldge that "the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on....that everything rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing"

A simply excellent read.

And what's more, I never would have truly known it was historical fiction without the author's note. Good historical fiction can... ring heartfully true in this time.