LIZZIE BRIGHT AND THE BUCKMINSTER BOY — Review

Thought for the Day:

“I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don’t want to get up.”  
~ Joyce Carol Oates ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

Sarah L. Kaufman has a terrific article from Writer’s Digest HERE that will help you jazz up your writing by zhuzhing up your verbs. Don’t miss this one.

The last thing you want to do when writing is bore your reader. HERE Nathan Bransford has a great post called If your protagonist is bored, you can bet your reader will be too. Nathan always has something worthwhile to say.

Angela Ackerman has a GREAT guest post HERE on Writers in the Storm all about How to Write Authentic Fear. This will really help you raise the stakes for your characters.

My daughter Maggie will arrive tonight for a few days. She just finished the workshop of a new show off Broadway in New York. I knew if she sold her apartment in New York and moved to Seattle, she would get work on the East Coast, and I was right. She not only got this workshopped show, but she will be doing a show in Connecticut all of November and December. Anyway, this is all the long way of telling you I won’t be here next week. Maggie and I will be driving to Seattle next weekend to take the last of her stuff that is stored here to her new place. On another note, I don’t usually spend much time talking about movies on my blog, but I went to the movies last week and had the best time. I saw Coyote vs. Acme. When I was a kid, our local theatre had a matinee every Saturday, and we went quite often. Back then, every movie showing started with cartoons, and we all hoped and prayed for Warner Bros. cartoons. They were the best, and of those, Wile E. Coyote vs. the Road Runner was my personal favorite. Honestly, I didn’t have much hope that today’s Hollywood would be able to replicate the fun experience of those great cartoons. Boy, was I wrong. They could not have done a better job. If you need to escape the real world and have some great laughs, go see this film. It is the best thing I’ve seen in a very long time.

I continue today with my journey through the writing of Gary D. Schmidt. LIZZIE BRIGHT AND THE BUCKMINSTER BOY is next on my list. I’ve been hearing from friends who are reading my posts that for many, this is their favorite of his novels. It certainly is in my top five. It is a great story well told.

Turner Buckminster III moves with his parents from Boston to the small town of Phippsburg, Maine, where his father is to be the pastor at Phippsburg’s First Congregational Church. It’s never easy to be the new kid, but when you are the new kid and a minister’s kid, it’s doubly hard. He meets the town bullies pretty quickly and realizes they learned their bullying ways from some of the adults in town. The richest, most important man in town — Mr. Stonecrop — seems to think he can tell everyone in town how they should act, who they should like, and more. He also seems to think he can tell Rev. and Mrs. Buckminster how Turner should be raised. His father toes the line, and Turner gets the brunt of it. The town leaders are bigoted and are trying to get the people on nearby Malaga Island, which had been settled by escaped slaves, turned out so they can build a resort in town and make it a tourist destination. Turner hits the fence of a cranky old lady, Mrs. Cobb, who lives nearby with a stone, and she complains loudly. Turner is told he will spend every day of the summer reading to her and playing hymns on the organ for her, but Turner does find some time to himself, and, while at the shore, he meets a young girl from Malaga Island, Lizzie Bright. Her name suits her. She is like a ray of sunshine in Turner’s life. She teaches him about her people and the history of the island; she teaches him to dig for clams and row a dinghy, and even how to play the special brand of baseball that is played in Phippsburg. But the town leaders of Phippsburg don’t take kindly to their friendship, except for Mrs. Cobb, who isn’t so cranky anymore and who allows Lizzie to come into her house to listen to the organ music. Things begin to change for some in Phippsburg, but not for everyone. Turner learns a good deal about his parents and about himself as things come to a head in this small town.

This is a great story, and it is, of course, told with spectacular writing. This is how Schmidt describes one encounter between Turner and his father. “The grim silence circled the room like an eager tiger. It flicked its tail greedily at them, circling, circling, circling. Turner felt that it was about to pounce, claws fully out.” (pages 98-99) Schmidt uses the sea breeze like another character in the book. “The sea breeze found him and twisted around him like a cat asking for a bowl of milk. It followed him up into the island and didn’t stop its play even when Turner went up to the Eason place–the burned ruins already cleansed by the winter and starting to find their way back into the woods.” (page 213) If you haven’t read LIZZIE BRIGHT AND THE BUCKMINSTER BOY, what are you waiting for? If you have read it, read it again. It’s so rich it deserves a second (or third or fourth) reading.

Please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.