The Blue Star: A Novel [Hardcover]

Tony Earley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2008

Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Tony Earley's bestseller Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in another tender and wise story of young love on the eve of World War Two. Jim Glass has fallen in love, as only a teenage boy can fall in love, with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw's girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the Navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie's heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven, and gives a young man's emotions a grown man's gravity. With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a favorite novel for thousands of readers, Tony Earley has fashioned another nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time--making it again even realer than our own day. This is a timeless and moving story of discovery, loss and growing up, proving why Tony Earley's writing "radiates with a largeness of heart" (Esquire).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Tony Earley's first novel was Jim the Boy and The Blue Star is its sequel. Time has moved forward to the eve of World War II, but everything else is much the same in the countryside of North Carolina. Jim Glass is now a senior in high school, living in the peaceful haven of his three uncles and his mother.

Love complicates his otherwise halcyon life, in the person of one Chrissie Steppe. We can't help whom we love, and Jim has made a big mistake by falling for Chrissie. She and her mother are in what amounts to indentured servitude up on the mountain, living on the property of the influential Bucklaws. Their son, Bucky, is in the Navy and expects that Chrissie will wait for him. She has nothing to say about it because she and her mother have nowhere to go if they are turned off Bucklaw's land because Chrissie has other ideas.

Earley's books are charming and evocative, calling back another time in this country when life was simpler, except in the realm of human emotions, which do not change with the times. He has a way of creating a time and place exactly as the people experiencing it would have felt, putting the reader in the picture. Finishing this book, the reader wonders what World War II and its aftermath will hold for Jim the boy, who is now a man. Perhaps Earley will tell us. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly

The small dramas of teenage love get caught in the crosswinds of a war in this sequel to the 2001 bestseller Jim the Boy. It's late summer 1941, and Jim Glass, now a high school senior, has an earnest, unshakable passion for classmate Chrissie Steppe. But as straightforward as his feelings are, the circumstances of his nascent romance are complex: Chrissie's family is indebted to their landlord, whose sailor son Bucky claimed Chrissie as his girl before shipping out to serve on the USS California at Pearl Harbor. Throughout Jim's fraught final year at school, he relies on the advice of his uncles, but after Pearl Harbor is bombed, they can't protect him from the war's toll. Questions of patriotism, sexuality and poverty weave their way into a narrative that's deceptive in its simplicity: the growing pains that Jim and his friends experience pack a startling emotional punch. (Mar.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (March 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316199079
• ISBN-13: 978-0316199070
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #925,330 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gold Star Novel, March 19, 2008

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H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blue Star: A Novel (Hardcover)

Jim Glass, the hero of Tony Earley's novel JIM THE BOY is now a senior in high school in rural North Carolina mountain country when THE BLUE STAR begins, is experiencing first love as only the young can as the United States is about to enter World War II-- The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor about half way through the story, an event that will surely affect the lives of all the young men of Jim's graduating class.

Tony Earley holds up a gentle but unflinching mirror to show us a time and place in our nation's history that is forever gone: the poor, isolated, sometimes prejudiced section of the country we call Appalachia. The character Dennis Deane, upon being told that the Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor, is unaware what Pearl Harbor is although he manages to get a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant the first time they have sex. Chrissie Steppe, whom Jim loves madly, bears the brunt of racial prejudice because her father "Injun Joe," is a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. Poverty is never far from the most successful of families, whether it is those who till the land or the "lintheads" who live and work in the horrible mill towns.

In often deceptively simple but evocative prose-- although he can certainly turn a phrase when he chooses to do so-- Mr. Earley in this sweet though never saccharine novel has created a group of memorable characters, some of whom will tear the heart right out of you. Be prepared for your eyes to burn. In addition to Jim, there are his three bachelor uncles who look out for his welfare at every move he makes; his mother who wishes he would marry Norma, a good girl whom he does not love; Chrissie, whom he does; Dennis and Ellie Something; and even Miss Brown, Jim's high school history teacher who entreats him not to forget the "conquistadors" he has studied in her class.

Having grown up in this part of the United States, I can say that Mr. Earley gets his facts, expressions and sayings right, whether it be "daggummit," "doggone," "daggum" or "chifforobe." Jim's mother makes a quilt from flour sacks. His family eats pinto beans and cornbread. They attend a brush arbor revival where the preacher might take up a love offering. They may joke that they are going to see a man about a dog. Finally, Jim reads Zane Grey and likes the Lone Ranger.

THE BLUE STAR, named after the banner that families of servicemen hang in their windows to show to the world that they have a family member fighting in battle, is about war and its effect on families, poverty, growing up and, although it is almost too trite to say, how love can have such a salutary effect on the uncertainty associated with going to war as well as the starkness of poverty. Jim's love-filled homelife is in sharp contrast to that of Chrissie's. There is a particularly moving scene in the novel where she tells him that there is a lot in the world to feel bad about. Jim answers that he had never thought that way; to the contrary, there are a lot of things in the world to feel good about.

Even though Mr. Earley writes about a long ago era and place, the story is timeless. Norma's commencement address, for example, so full of hope but so full of platitudes, as she talks about leaving our "small, but beloved home" and going into the bigger world, is echoed in thousands of high school auditoriums every spring across this country. And a son or daughter's going off to fight in a foreign land is just as raw and painful today as it was in 1941. The universality of THE BLUE STAR brings to mind Thornton Wilder's classic OUR TOWN, a play that never grows old and continues to delight and move each new generation. Mr. Earley's depiction of this section of North Carolina is reminiscent-- though certainly not derivative-- of some of the best novels of Reynolds Price, another North Carolina writer who writes beautifully about ordinary, blue-collar people, many of whom never leave the towns and villages where they were born.

Mr. Earley has been quoted as saying that in JIM THE BOY he tried to create a story that his grandmother could read-- as I recall-- and not be embarrassed, The same could be said of THE BLUE STAR. The strongest language in the entire novel is a couple of "damn's." As I finished it, I felt a profound sadness that my deceased father, another lover of Zane Grey novels, who was a few years older than Jim when this novel takes place but not too old to be drafted into World War II, cannot read it. He would have found the characters and what happens to them to be just the way it was.

THE BLUE STAR, even better than JIM THE BOY, is a fine example of why reading good literature will never go out of style.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I love everything about you." Jim Glass, April 27, 2008

By 

John Sollami (Stamford, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blue Star: A Novel (Hardcover)

Tony Earley, like his mentor Ernest Hemingway, was first a journalist. Now an Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and called "the future of American fiction," Earley has battled chronic depression his entire life. Each of his deceptively simple sentences are hard-fought victories. And now, with four books squeezed out from his inconstant instrument, we readers are so damned lucky to have them.

This morning I finished "The Blue Star" and tonight I still ache and yearn to read it again. It's been a very long time since an American novel has touched me like this one. Perhaps Capote's "The Grass Harp" can compare. Tony Earley has captured something here, a delicate piece of American life and adolescent pain that I dare not even attempt to articulate. All the fine descriptions and wonderfully fresh dialog are spot on. Jim Glass, the young man at the heart of this work, is drawn like a moth to the flame called Chrissie Steppe. Nothing can be done about this sadly impossible love, as it is what it is. Yet so much more lies within this simple storyline. Families, poverty, tragedies, and huge uncontrollable world forces move within this book like seismic stresses that shake the earth and shape its destiny. And all the while, from the first page to the last, Tony Earley is forming clear pictures of people, of places, and of a significant time in our history that is gone forever. Here are some examples of his writing: "The orchards rolled away from the farm road in prosperous formation, ridge after terraced ridge, all the way to the top of the mountain. The grass was combed white with frost. The fruit trees glittered like fountains whose water had sprung suddenly from the earth, only to freeze before it touched the ground." And then this: "The sky was low and gray and hard-looking--not the roiled, booming sky of early spring, but the bitter, set face of deep winter. A cutting wind from the west chased trash from the fields across the road and occasionally dashed a thimbleful of sleet against the windshield...."

I cannot tell you how deeply I was moved by this book. It's impossible to tell you. It is not a small book or a small story. Those who have reviewed it this way have missed its depths. It is a masterpiece. No pressure, Tony Earley, but I will be praying that you find your way to the next installment of Jim Glass's life. You have enriched me and all of us with your work, as only the finest artist can.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I hope there is a 3rd in the series!, August 10, 2009

By 

Kelly Jackson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blue Star: A Novel (Paperback)

I have to say it took me a little while to get into this book but when I did I found it worth it even though this is the type of book that I wouldn't have normally picked out for myself to read. I am glad, however, that this book was sent to me because I really did have a great experience reading it.

The time frame is on the eve of World War II and Jim is now a senior in High School. Jim has broken up with his long time girlfriend Norma, and has become smitten with a half Indian girl named Chrissie. The problem with this is the book takes place in Aliceville, North Carolina circa 1941 so racism and backwards thinking runs deep. Also, Chrissie's grandparent's also work and live on a prominent family's property which their son has laid claim to Chrissie to be his fiance, no matter how much Chrissie disagrees with it. Jim, through twists and turns in the plot line, and family secrets revealed, pursues Chrissie, having fallen in love with her.

The sexist, bigoted, and downright backward way of the characters is sometimes hard to see past or even relate to when you are 31 years old and have no clue on how things really were back then but it's also interesting if you find that period in American history something you wish to relive or learn about. Another refreshing thing about this book is it's a book that if my 13 year old would pick up I honestly wouldn't have any problems with her reading but it's not a young adult book by any stretch of the means. I'd recommend this book to a few members of my family and friends.