Customer Reviews

Sonny's House of Spies (Richard Jackson Books (Atheneum Hardcover))

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Red Alert! All middle school librarians take note. My grandson, who thinks reading chapter books is a bit like eating ground glass, could not put this book down. That is after I bribed him to read the first two chapters!

There are people in this book, Loretta, especially, who will make you cry and laugh out loud. Warning, adults and kids both, you will have a hard time putting it down. So you will read it as fast as you can and then, like me, wish you had read it more slowly so you could stretch the enjoyment. It is a winner!

It's the 1947, in a small town in Alabama and Sonny's dad has just walked out on them. "You don't know my daddy," the book begins, and Sonny tells the reader of the day his life changed. He knows there has to be something more to the split up than he has been told, and it puzzles him. A few years go by, and the reader sees small town Southern life through Sonny's eyes as he tries to handle his own life without a father, as well as every day living with his sometimes funny, sometimes difficult family. Sonny deals with heartbreak, pain, and love, familial and otherwise, and at last finds peace within himself regarding his father.

Sadly, this brief synopsis does nothing for the book. Telling a skeleton outline of the plot with no spoilers and none of Lyon's amazing writing is so unjust! This is an amazing book, with prose that sometimes verges on poetry. Lyon had me laughing out loud with Sonny's predicaments on one page, near tears on another, and spellbound from the sheer beauty of her language so often. She captures the feel of the South so well and so subtly that there are bound to be references that will pass by those uninitiated to Southern culture.

I couldn't NOT share a few lines that caught me especially:

"It was a sleepy kind of morning, the air like bathwater."

"Like some reversible cloth, Mama's laughter flipped over into sobs."

"We just stood by the shiny gray coffin with its handles like fancy toilet-paper holders and said "Yes" and "No" and "Thank you" and breathed whatever breaths came by: mint, onion, tobacco, whiskey, and bad."

"All the windows had been propped open, but it was one of those afternoons when the air lay on top of you like a big cat, and no waving of cardboard Jesus-at-the-door fans could make it get up and move."



My main regret is that I fear the intended audience will not be interested in the subject and that some of the emotional dilemmas may really be too mature for grades 5-8. It would be more appropriate, I think, for older YA readers. I would suggest that a parent of younger readers read it first (I give it a full recommendation for all adult readers) and then decide when/if it's appropriate for their child at that age.

Another quibble is that the dust jacket blurb is not very appealing; I only chose to read it because it took place in the South. I really can't see a child picking this up and saying, "oh, this sounds just what I've been wanting to read". It will most likely take an adult pushing it on them to get a child to read it. A new, more interesting cover would be advised.

But, as far as the book goes. . . It's a five star read for older YAs and adults. Masterful writing all the way through; I will be looking up her other novels right away.

Sonny's House of Spies Wow! What a truly excellent work of fiction. I know it's fiction...but I KNOW these characters! Sonny's House of Spies may have been written for a younger audience, but adults may enjoy it even more. For any Southerner raised in the '40's and '50's, it takes you home again.

This book is a good read, exclamation point. No matter who you are, you will stay awake at night to finish it, and then be mad at yourself the next night, for being so greedy. It engages huge issues, but they are located in human hearts, in a neighborhood like the ones we all live in, no matter if they be rural or urban, penthouse or tenement. The characters -- both male and female -- are brave and honest and trying their very best to live in a complicated world. In this book, people hurt people and people help people, but there are no "bad guys" -- there are just human beings, painted in words by a master story-teller and poet, George Ella Lyon.