Every so often you pick up and read a book and know instantly you have a winner on your hands. So it was and is with this new novel by Fran Cannon Slayton. The fact is some authors have that something "special," while others simply are found lacking. This author most definitely has it. We have on our hands here a very remarkable work!
This is a coming of age book about a young man growing up in a small town in West Virginia in the early 1940s. Ms. Slayton has used a somewhat unique technique in that she tells the story of our young lad by relating incidences which happen on each Halloween (All Hallows' Eve) from 1940 through 1949. Each chapter tells us of the adventures, feelings, relationships, and essence of the young boy's life; each chapter is a story unto its own, but each story is interlocked in a way that we are allowed to view the life of not only boy growing into a man, but also that of his family, friends, town and surprisingly, the changes our entire country was going through during this period. Now this may sound like a tall order, but the author has pulled it off in spades!
There are two features in this work that tie the story together and to which the author hangs all. First, this is a deeply intimate tale of the relationship between a father and a son, and secondly there is the ever present background of the trains and the railroad. This entire community; indeed the young man `s life and the life of his family, are closely tied to the steam engine at a time when progress is changing everything with the coming of the diesel power engines and, lets face it, the death of the American Rail Road.
This story, while extremely profound and serious in many ways is actually hilarious at times. The author's sense of humor, as transmitted through the eyes of a young man, shines throughout the book. Many times I found myself chuckling and in fact, laughing. Again, it takes quite a lot of writing skill to pull this swing from sadness and pathos to hilarity and light heartedness off, but the author is well up to the task. It is quite amazing, actually.
There are several items the reader needs to note and will spot instantly from the first page. First, Ms. Clayton has nailed her characters perfectly. I grew up in a small town in the Ozark Mountains at the very time this story took place. There was not one single character in this book that was not absolutely believable. There was not one single character that I could not introduce to you their counter part in my own home town as I grew up. Secondly, this work is being marketed and targeted for youth, ages between 9 and 12. This you will quickly find is a bit misleading. While this book is certainly appropriate for that age group, it goes well and far beyond. This work is one of those cross over books which a youth can read and enjoy, but at the same time someone like me, slowly sinking into his dotage, can read and relish just as well as the young. Thirdly, I was gratified to see that the author did not make the mistake that so many authors make in that she did not use the regional dialect to any great extent. Now I am a dialect junkie...absolutely love the stuff, but I promise you that the youth of today, for the most part, are completely turned off by this and have a problem reading it. As a retired person, forced by my wife to continue work simply to get me out from under foot, I substitute teach, pretty much full time. I know the reaction of the kids when they encounter a work filled with dialog with strong regional dialect included; they simply block it out and give up their attempt to read and understand it. The author has used grammatical errors in her dialog, but these errors are universal, natural and are still with us today. They are simply how the young speak. Her use of this is workable and readable and understandable to the kids that will be reading this book.
It is also important to note that this is a tale concerning change. We live in a super fast world today where change is literally with us on a daily basis. It is somehow comforting to know that this is not the only generation faced with changes and the underlying unsaid message is "it they could do it, i.e. survive change, then so can I." I like this.
This is certainly a book about boys and written for boys but do not be thrown by this. Kids are kids, people are people and at a certain level, gender plays little role in a story well told. I do not see why kids of either sex would not enjoy this work. If you think about it, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were books about boys and for boys and those two works seemed to have worked out quite well.
This is one work that you will want to add to your child's library, but treat yourself and read it. School teachers, school librarians and public librarians...jump on this one quick. I suspect we are going to see this one in a lot of classrooms over the next several years.
Bottom line: We have a wonderfully crafted story which is extremely readable with a delightful syntax. We have a story that in many ways is timeless, as the actions and emotions of youth really have not changed all that much over the last couple thousand years, and we have a good piece of literature that will not only entertain, but it will teach. It really does not get much better than this.
