Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"Kid, what changed you?"
--The Pretenders

In the back row of the room, "wedged between the makeup girls and the gangsters," there sat tall and gawky Bernie:

"In the eighth grade other kids seemed to know who they were. They were 'into' things. Skateboarding, soccer, Xbox, iPods. Clubs. Eighth grade seemed to be a time for joining clubs. Bernie was a reader and a pretty good chess player, but Pittstown Middle didn't have a Reader's Club or a Chess Club. Playing chess meant you were a nerd, but there wasn't a Nerds' Club either."

Up in front, there sat short and square Winifred:

"Winifred was a front-row girl, one of those with a pop-up arm. No matter the question, Winifred had the full and complete answer. Bernie could tell she was about as popular at Pittstown Middle as the cafeteria meat loaf, except of course with teachers like Mrs. Nelson."

Becoming increasingly frustrated as she proposes a series of clubs for which not a single student expresses any interest -- the International Club, the Journaling Club, the Renaissance Comedy Club, the Live Poets' Society -- Winifred appears at school one day wearing a green knit hat with a bright red pom-pom and proposes formation of a Green Hat Club.

" 'Now, Winifred,' Mrs. Nelson said, 'of what possible social significance is a Green Hat Club?'
"That was when Winifred lost her cool. With a face red as her pom-pom, Winifred stood up and rattled off all the names of the other newly formed clubs -- the Jim Carrey Club, Bling Bling on Mondays, the PBJs (members had to have names that begin with one of those revered three letters.) She saved for last the Fashionistas, all six members of which had worn shocking-pink boas that day and sat in a bunch like a chummy family of flamingos.
" 'Social significance, Mrs. Nelson? Social significance?' By that time, Winifred was on the verge of tears and her voice shook dangerously. 'Popularity, Mrs. Nelson. That's what clubs are all about. Don't you know that?'"

After a couple of weeks of Winifred's incessantly wearing her green hat at school, she is joined at a table in the cafeteria by Bernie who is wearing a 99-cent puke-green stocking cap he's found at Kmart. A minute later they are formulating a club constitution. And thus begins the friendship and subsequent romance between the pair, who pledge their mutual allegiance to always be anything but ordinary.

"Striking out? Well, count me in.
I'm gonna stand by right your side through thick and thin
Ain't no doubt. Gonna win.
A walk through hell ain't bad compared to where we've been."
-- Clarence Clemmons & Jackson Browne, "You're a Friend of Mine"

ANYTHING BUT ORDINARY is a book that quickly surprised me, for after only a couple of dozen pages the tale morphs into a story of the pair as two college-age kids who are now connected by considerable mutual history and separated by...well, by the stuff that life throws at each of them.

For Bernie, it is the death of his mother during his senior year of high school: "His mother was strong and gentle and funny. She made Bernie laugh, even when he didn't feel like it. Like a best friend, she believed in him." With his mother gone, Bernie is alone with his father, a man with whom he has rarely talked, "a man who worked in a tire shop from six a.m. until six p.m." and "was snoring in his La-Z-Boy halfway through Wheel of Fortune."

With his father drinking, and the house a pigsty, Bernie hears a little voice asking him, "Why bother?" and so it is that Bernie lets his grades -- and their dreams -- slip, and Winifred heads across the country the following fall to the university in California that they were supposed to be attending together.

In Valerie Hobbs' finest piece of writing to date, this smooth and quirky tale portrays the very believable transformations that each of the two young adults undergo. The question is, after everything they go through, are Bernie and Winifred really still the same friends-in-love deep down inside?

" She smiled a sad, brave smile. 'Sometimes I look at you and suddenly I remember some silly little thing we did. Nobody was as close as us, nobody!' "

Richie Partington
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