Books I've Read: Okay for Now

 

I finished the book I had loaded to my Libby app and needed something else to read, so I browsed around a bit and found this one that looked like it could be interesting.  Within about five minutes of starting, I knew I was in good hands with this one.  It's as voicey as all hell and I was in Doug's pocket from page two or three.

It's set in the late sixties, during the Vietnam War.  Doug is in junior high in New York, loves the Yankees and his prize possession is a cap that was given to him by Joe Pepitone when he came to throw a ball around with some of the kids on the school team.   Unfortunately, Doug has two older brothers and the one who still lives at home - the other is in Vietnam - is kind of jerk and bullies him mercilessly.  So it's no big surprise when this brother finds the cap, steals it, then passes it on for cash.

This is the very efficient set up for the story which actually begins when Doug's father loses his job and they're forced to move to a small upstate town where he's found work at a factory.  A tough bully of a man, he doesn't take any of his family's feelings into account when he uproots them from their home and takes them to a dump of a house in the sticks.

Dough doesn't think he'll ever fit in there.  Everyone looks at him suspiciously, especially after a wave of petty crime sweeps the town and all eyes are on his older brother as the perpetrator.  But then Doug meets Lil outside the library and she doesn't seem to care that he's a weird outsider.  And inside the library he discovers a book of paintings by James Audubon than make his feel things he's never felt before.

With the support of the few new friends he makes in his new home, Doug begins building a life for himself, discovering he has talents he never suspected he possessed, finding the strength to stand up to his abusive father and to cope with living with his oldest brother who comes back from the war a very different man.

I really enjoyed this book.  Doug is exactly the kind of scrappy underdog character I love and his way of talking about the world he lives in and the people around him is both touching and hilarious at times.  He's a character you can't help but root for,  even when you want to scream at him not to do things you know he's going to do because he's a fourteen-year-old boy.  The supporting characters are all really well drawn too, even really incidental ones like the old guy who Doug delivers groceries to and needs his lightbulbs changed every week.

So I'd recommend this one.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Midwesterner Gary D. Schmidt won Newbery Honor awards for Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boys and The Wednesday Wars, two coming-of-age novels about unlikely friends finding a bond. Okay For Now, his latest novel, explores another seemingly improbable alliance, this one between new outsider in town Doug Swieteck and Lil Spicer, the savvy spitfire daughter of his deli owner boss. With her challenging assistance, Doug discovers new sides of himself. Along the way, he also readjusts his relationship with his abusive father, his school peers, and his older brother, a newly returned war victim of Vietnam.