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

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"Before the War...
...the evenings lingered longer, and it was always summer when it wasn't Halloween, or Christmas.
"Long, lazy light reached between the houses, and the whole street played our version of hide-and-seek, called only by olly-olly-in-free and supper time.
"Before I could keep up, I rode my brother's shoulders, hung in the crook of Dad's good arm. I rode them across the long shadows of afternoon, high over hedges, heading for home base, when our street was the world,
before the war,
when there wasn't a cloud in the sky."
--opening passage of ON THE WINGS OF HEROES

"Bills pile up sky high
Send that boy off to die
Makes me want to holler
The way they do my life."
--Marvin Gaye, "Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)"

Do you know what really sucks? You find an author who writes a book you totally love. He or she does it several times, so that you learn to drop everything else when their new book arrives on the doorstep. Overnight you gulp it down. It is even better than you hoped it would be.

What sucks about that, you ask? Well, it's that you can't then ask Richard Peck (or any of the hundreds of other exceptional authors I know) to deliver another book next week or next month. The guy's worked hour after hour, day after day, investing a chunk of his life into that book, and you've gulped it down in a matter of hours.

It's kind of like gardening.

I went through the Back to the Earth thing in the mid-Seventies, at the same time that I was first involved in the No Nukes movement. The visions of some writers I've never met, such as Stewart Brand and Stephen Gaskin, contributed to my now having lived in idyllic country settings on both coasts over the past three decades. It has also meant that I've enjoyed the delightful companionship (creamed-corn breath and all) of my pet Nubian goats during these same years.

But I'm no gardener. I love gorging on a crop of fresh, super-sweet sugar snap peas. But you have to do all that work, all that watering and weeding, and all that waiting, and then the peas are there but for an instant, before being consumed in the blink of an eye. The idea of being a gardener seems even crazier than the author-book deal. At least, in regard to a book I've gulped down after an author has spent all year growing it, there still exists the certainty that other people can read the same book, that I can reread the same book, and that I can booktalk the book to others and share the delight I found in gulping it down.

Of course, neither the example of an author working all year to write a book that I consume overnight, nor the example of putting all that energy into a crop of sugar snap peas that is quickly consumed, comes close to matching the insanity and the waste of human potential that we face when a president entrusted with the lives of our children makes a bad mistake and then refuses to admit it.

Just think about the pain and effort a mother goes through just to bring a baby into this world. Think about the subsequent diapering, the feeding, the rocking, and the teaching how to walk, and how to get dressed. Think about the reading and singing aloud; the teaching of proper hand washing and dental care; how to bicycle and swim and cartwheel; how to get along with other kids; how to draw letters and numbers, and how to combine those symbols that represent sounds into groups of symbols that represent things and ideas. Think about the work to teach a child how to consistently do their homework, wipe their feet, and clean their room; how to brainstorm and research and think abstractly and outside the box; how to be honest and safe and not fall victim to drugs or drunk drivers or dares.

Think of the waves of joy that it brings to parents, to siblings, to friends, to teachers, and to community members, as a young person grows into a playing, thinking, joking, working, loving, uniquely individual presence in the world.

Think about all the love that goes into growing up one young man or woman who can then get sent to his or her death in a war whose genesis was an error in judgment by a president who was able to buy his own way out of a previous, similarly misguided war that was taking place when he, himself, was younger.

It makes me wanna holler.

Not having been alive during World War II, I can only speculate how I would have felt and reacted to Hitler's atrocities or Japan's attack. But I can imagine what everyone would have said if, in retaliation for Pearl Harbor, FDR had ignored Japan and had, instead, ordered the immediate bombing and invasion of Iraq.

Sorry, but it is hard to focus exclusively on the exceptional humor and poignancy that permeates Richard Peck's World War II-little-brother-on-the-homefront tale when, in the real world, the staggering number of human lives squandered in Iraq grows larger just in the time it takes me to express my feelings about it all.

We know that what makes really exceptional historical fiction -- no matter what time or place in which it is set -- is the ability to relate it to the reader's real present-day life. And, as Richard Peck has done time and again, ON THE WINGS OF HEROES is truly an exceptional piece of historical fiction. This time Peck focuses on the world, the adventures, and the misadventures of Davy Bowman, a young Midwestern boy during World War II. For instance, there is the time that he and his buddy Scooter are supposed to be out gathering milkweed for the War effort and end up playing in someone's old barn, pretending to drive a rusty, worn-out automobile they stumble across.

" 'Well anyway you're not tramps,' the figure said.
"Our eyes adjusted. It was a dried-up woman with a face like a walnut. She'd lowered her blunderbuss. Had that just been a warning shot? The gun hung broken open in the crook of her wrinkled arm, like she'd been out hunting. Her skirt tails were in her boots. What century were we in?
" 'But boys in a barn are trouble enough,' she said. 'Start toward me.'
"My heart lurched, and I had to follow, keeping even with Scooter. 'It was that Beep Beep of yours that gave us away,' I muttered to him. His web belt was way bigger than Scooter's waist. It worked down over his knees as we walked, closer and closer to this old woman and the barrels on that shotgun, still smoking.
" 'Smoking?' she said. 'Cornsilk in a dry barn?'
" 'N-n-no,' we said.
" 'What's in those canteens? she inquired. 'Home brew? Rot gut? Corn liquor?'
" 'N-n-no,' we said.
"Scooter's belt wound down to his ankles, and his canteen settled in the dust.
" 'Town boys,' she noticed. 'What's your business up in my barn?'
"Scooter found his tongue. I'd left mine somewhere. 'We're collecting milkweed for the war effort,' he piped.
" 'Did you find much milkweed growing inside my barn?'
"She wore tortoiseshell spectacles, old as the car. Her magnified gaze crackled through them.
" 'We like your old automobile,' Scooter said in a small voice.
" 'And you just make yourselves at home on other people's property?'
"We pretty much did. We'd been in and out of other people's attics and basements all summer long, scouting for scrap. We didn't mention it."

Davy Bowman has a dad who enthusiastically gets out and plays hide and seek with the neighborhood kids, hides out with Davy to turn the tables on the big kids who come around to cause mischief on Halloween, and to whom Davy can be honest, no matter what he's done. Davy's big brother, Bill, is a sibling any little kid would idolize. In the midst of an idyllic childhood a la Peck (meaning a silo-full of hysterically funny schoolmate, teacher, family, and neighborhood situations), the War becomes personal for the Bowmans as Bill heads off to train as a military pilot. And when the characters back home make brief mention of some of the numbers related to the War, you realize that whether or not Bill Bowman will make it home alive is merely a function of statistics and the luck of the draw. And it is clear that Davy, his family, and his neighbors all recognize this reality.

"You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one"
--John Lennon

I dream of the day when a children's author will begin a piece of historical fiction with, "Back when there used to be wars..."

But in the meantime, Richard Peck, in less than 150 pages, provides our children with the kind of history lesson that a two-story stack of textbooks cannot match.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com