Review
------
"Nothing is at it seems when Trouble arrives in varied and
symbolic ways for two families and two communities. Franklin
Smith, the arrogant scion of an aristocratic New England family,
is accidentally struck while running and subsequently dies. The
blame is accepted by a classmate, a Cambodian immigrant from a
nearby town. When legal technicalities prevent Chay Chouan from
being jailed, the perceived miriage of justice reverberates
through idyllic Blythbury-by-the-Sea. Franklin's younger
brother, Henry, becomes determined to climb Katahdin, a
feat that Franklin had coldly suggested might prove Henry had
guts. Henry sets out hitchhiking for the ain with best
friend question. Somewhat improbably they are picked up by Chay,
who has been expelled by his her and is now driving the truck
that killed Franklin. Their symbolic journey predictably
includes moments of danger, self-discovery, and reconciliation,
fortunately leavened by the humorously ironic Sanborn. Complex
structure allows revelations into the character of Chay, child of
a violent refugee camp, unwanted product of rape, lover of
poetry, and protector of Henry's sister (in a Romeo-and-Juliet
twist). Teeming with plot elements, some of which may seem too
purposeful, and richly veined with social and psychological
crosscurrents, this story may be seen as allegorical in its
intent and representation. Nevertheless it contains Schmidt's
eloquent language and compelling characters, as well as
compassionate examinations of the passage from childhood to
adulthood and of the patters of common experience and mark and
unite us as humans."--School Library Journal, starred review
"Henry and his family live the charmed existence of the
well-bred, well-heeled New England old-money crowd, exemplified
by successful, professional parents, a coastal home that has been
in the family for hundreds of years, and bright, athletic
children attending posh private academies and always rising to
the challenges expected of them. That world shatters when
Franklin, Henry's elder brother and role model, is hit by a truck
belonging to Chay Chouan, the son of a Cambodian refugee, leaving
Franklin with only one arm and indeterminate brain activity.
Flurries of violence erupt as Franklin's fellow lacrosse players
vent their rage on the Cambodian community, and Henry begins to
question whether Franklin was such a good role model after all,
given as he was to racially motivated bullying even before the
accident. Henry decides that he needs to follow through on a
plan that Franklin used to taunt him with, climbing a dangerous
ain as a rite of passage into Franklin's kind of macho
manhood. Henry's version of the plan, though, leads to
forgiveness as he hitches a ride with Chay of all people, and he
learns secrets about his brother, his sister, and Chay that lead
him to quesion the kind of person he wants to be. Schmidt
creates a rich and credible world peopled with fully developed
characters who have a lot of complex reasoning to do, reckoning
that involves confronting issues of white privilege and
responsibility for racial reconciliation and acceptance. In the
midst of the drama, a hurricane uncovers a burned-out slave ship
that belonged to Henry's ancestor; its presence, along with an
encounter with some Vietnam vets, ups the ante on the white guilt
message just in case you weren't paying attention, and thus seems
a bit gratuitous. Schmidt's prose, however, is flawless, and
Henry's odyssey of growth and understanding is pitch-perfect and
deeply satisfying."--Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
"If you build your house far enough from Trouble, then Trouble
will never find you." Such is the credo of the fortunate Smith
family of Blythbury-by-the-Sea, a (fictional) WASP-y outpost of
Boston. But when Trouble arrives, it just keeps on coming.
First, oldest son Franklin lies in a coma after being hit by a
car; a young Cambodian immigrant is identified as the driver.
Daughter Louisa, hugely distraught, retreats to her bedroom, and
fourteen-year-old Henry is left on his own. With the newly
adopted Black Dog, whom he's rescued from the sea, Henry sets off
to climb Maine's Mt. Katahdin (as he and Franklin had planned to
do together) and is joined by unexpected companions. Schmidt
embarks on a road trip that limns the growing friendship of three
unforgettable boys-Henry; his honest, aggravating best friend
Sanborn; and the accused Cambodian boy, Chay Chuan. A host of
coincidences strains credulity at times, but also allows for an
extraordinary breadth, widening themes and resolving plot lines.
Like Chaucer's pilgrims, Henry, Chay, and Louisa all have to find
their way to grace. The accident that brings trouble to Henry
and his family also brings self-realization and the uncomfortable
knowledge that both Henry's idolized brother and the vaunted
history of the Smith family are not what they seem. Along with
the pivotal role played by the enthusiastic Black Dog, rich
secondary characters enhance a 1970s-set story that adds much to
the discussion of how tragedy and racism affect individuals,
families, and whole communities."--The Horn Book
"Tautly constructed, metaphorically rich, emotionally gripping
and seductively told,Schmidt's (The Wednesday Wars) novel opens
in the 300-year-old ancestral home of Henry Smith, whose her
has raised him to believe that "if you build your house far
enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you." With
such an opening, it is inevitable that Trouble does find the
aristocratic Smiths: Henry's older brother, Franklin, is
critically injured by a truck. A Cambodian refugee named Chay,
who attends the same school as Franklin, acknowledges
responsibility, but over the course of Chay's trial it occurs, to
Henry at least, that it was Franklin who sought Trouble: the
racism he directed toward Chay specifically and Cambodian
immigrants generally has been so widely shared in the community
that no one challenged it. Twin sequences of events plunge the
Smiths and Chay into further tragedy, also revealing the ravages
of Chay's childhood under the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, a
storm exposes a charred slave ship long buried on the Smiths'
private beach: it emerges that their house has been close to
Trouble all along. For all the fine crafting, the novel takes a
disturbingly broad-brush approach to racism. Characters are
either thuggish or willfully blind or saintly, easily pegged on a
moral scale-and therefore untrue to life."--Publishers Weekly
"One of children's literature's prose masters presents a
typically deliberate tale of moral awakening. Henry Smith,
younger son of a well-to-do Massachusetts family, finds his
secure world rocked to its foundations when his jogging brother
is critically injured by a pickup truck driven by a young
Cambodian immigrant. His family falls apart. Three things keep
Henry, too, from crumbling completely: his hatred for the boy who
drove the truck, his love for the stray Black Dog he brings home
and his determination to climb Maine's Mt. Katahdin, the ain
his brother teased him he'd never summit. The leisurely
development of plot and characters allows the latter full
emotional complexity and nuances the former with the layers of
relationships that, willy-nilly, bind humanity together. One
subplot too many-the wreck of a slaver appears on the Smiths'
beach-results in a little too much Significant Musing and a wild
coincidence that threatens the credibility of the whole. It's a
measure of Schmidt's control in other realms that this still
stands as a deeply moving and pleasurable read."--Kirkus Reviews
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About the Author
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Gary D. Schmidt is the author of the Newbery Honor and Printz
Honor book Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. He is a
professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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1 Henry Smith’s her told him that if you build your house far
enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.
So the Smiths lived where their people had lived for exactly
three hundred years, far away from Trouble, in
Blythbury-by-the-Sea, where the currents of the Atlantic give up
their last southern warmth to the coast of Massachusetts before
they head to the cold granite shores of Maine. From the casement
windows of his bedroom, Henry could look out over the feathery
waves, and on sunny days—and it seemed as if all his life there
had been only sunny days—he could open the leaded-glass doors and
walk onto a stone balcony and the water would glitter all the way
to the horizon. Henry’s first word had been “blue.” The first
taste he could remember was saltwater. The first Christmas gift
that meant anything to him was a kayak, which he had taken into
the water that very morning, so calm had the sea been, because
Trouble was so far away.
Henry Smith’s house, be in 1678 with the coinage of his
seventeenth-century merchant ancestors, stood on stone ledges,
braced against the storms and squalls and hurricanes and
blizzards that blew out of the northeast. Its beams were still as
straight as the day they had been hewn, and Henry could run his
hands along the great oaks that dwelled beneath the flooring and
feel the sharp edges left by the ancient maul strokes. The house
had been changed and added to and changed again for a century and
a half, so that now, under a roof of dark and heavy slate, three
staircases wound to the second and third floors, and a fourth
climbed up until it struck a wall whose ancient framing only
suggested the doorway that had once been there. The house’s eight
fireplaces were each big enough to stand in, and one had a
hidey-hole that huddled beside the hearth and was guarded by a
secret panel in the wood closet. Henry and his brother, Franklin,
and his sister, Louisa, would hide in it during the winter,
because it was always warm. The floors of the house were wide
pine downstairs, wider oak upstairs, quarried stone in the
kitchen and the end-rooms behind it, and Italian ochre tile in
the parlors.
The north parlor held lacquered Asian furniture brought back from
Hong Kong and Singapore aboard nineteenth-century steamers. The
south parlor showed the French Impressionist collection,
including two Van Goghs and a small Renoir. The downstairs hall
was an armory of Revolutionary War flintlocks that the
Blythbury-by-the-Sea Historical Society borrowed for exhibitions
on the Fourth of July because they still fired.
The library held two shelves of medieval prayer books whose gold
and red ad usums flashed as if they had just been scripted
beneath the stern and glowing icons hanging on the dark paneling.
Henry and his her would sometimes read them—“for the use of”
this abbey, “for the use of” this monastery, “for the use of”
this court—and then look out toward a gold and red sunset. “This
house will stand until the Apocalypse,” Henry’s her would say
reverently.
Henry believed him.
Blythbury-by-the-Sea had grown up slowly around the Smith house.
Now it was the kind of town where no one who lived there, worked
there. Weekdays, the dark suits commuted in sleek foreign cars to
downtown Boston—Henry’s her drove to a prestigious and
well-regarded accountancy firm where he was a partner—and then
the suits came back at suppertime, glad to have escaped the noisy
crowd of the city. On Sundays, Henry’s family went to St. Anne’s
Episcopal Church—where their family had owned a pew since
1680—and in the afternoons, they took long walks beneath the
broad les of Townshend Park, or drove up to New Hampshire to
buy le , or if the weather was warm, they climbed down
into Salvage Cove, the long stretch of perfect white sand and
huge black boulders below their house. Local guidebooks called it
the finest private beach on the North Shore. Looking at the shore
from the library windows, Henry agreed.
On Monday mornings, Franklin and Louisa drove early to Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow Preparatory High School—where no one wore
uniforms. Thirty minutes later, Henry’s parents drove him to the
John Greenleaf Whittier Academy—where all seventh- and
eighth-grade students wore uniforms involving a white shirt, blue
blazer, red-and-white tie (the school colors), khaki pants, black
socks, black loafers, and—no kidding—red-and-white boxers.
Longfellow Prep and Whittier Academy were both old schools, made
of burnt brick and filled with kids whose names were so
Anglo-Saxon that King Richard the Lion-Hearted would have
recognizeed them all. In the fall, they played rugby; in the
spring, they rowed crew.
No one was surprised that Henry, who was one of the smaller
rugby players, liked spring a whole lot better than
fall—especially since he could never hope to match the
rrrrrecords that Franklin—Franklin Smith, oh Franklin Smith, the
great lord of us all, Franklin Smith—had put up on the wooden
Athletic Records panels for his rugby play.
Which Franklin reminded Henry of whenever he chose to notice
him.
Blythbury-by-the-Sea was the kind of town where oaks and les
shaded quiet clapboard and brick and stone houses that had seen a
whole lot of New England winters and were doing fine, thank you.
Tight and prim, their windows presided over Main Street, whose
two narrow lanes meandered into the town center, where tourists
up from Boston and New York came to visit boutiques and rare-book
shops and antique stores and fancy-jewelry artisans and gourmet
delis. Occasionally, one of the town’s two men would stroll
past the boutiques and delis, sometimes stopping to pick up a bit
of litter that someone from out of town had dropped.
Which is about the most they did in a day, because
Blythbury-by-the-Sea was a town that Trouble could not find.
This is not to say that Trouble didn’t try.
An autumn ago, Franklin had ed his ankle so badly in rugby
practice that he wasn’t able to play in the Eastern Regionals.
The entire student body of Longfellow Prep went into mourning.
The was so severe that Franklin couldn’t even drive, so
Mrs.
Smith drove him and Louisa to school.
Everyone at Longfellow Prep thought that Mrs. Smith drove because
Louisa—who did have her driver’s license, after all—was
distraught about Franklin and the Eastern Regionals. But, really,
it was because Louisa was a terrible, awful driver who panicked
at stop signs, stoplights, and crosswalks. Mr. Smith said that
she should never be allowed behind the wheel of the BMW—never
mind the Fiat!
There had been four trips to Massachusetts General Hospital in
Boston over Franklin’s ankle, and the doctors had warned that the
meant that he might walk with a pronounced limp for quite
some time. Still, Franklin rode the team bus down to Foxboro and
crutched his way over to the course to watch Louisa run in her
third State cross-country finals—and take first, even though she
was still only a junior.
And he drove in the Academy bus to Henry’s rugby Districts in
Deerfield, where Franklin was lauded as the star alumnus that he
was, and where Whittier was whipped by Kenilworth with a score
that Henry tried to forget but that Franklin wouldn’t let him. By
Thanksgiving, Franklin had decided to did his crutches. By
Christmas, no one who didn’t know about the would have
noticed a limp. By the first January thaw, he was again running
five miles a day, and people who lived in the clapboard and brick
and stone houses clapped when he went by.
And Longfellow Prep won the Eastern Regionals, after all—which
Franklin was mostly happy about.
Trouble.
Two summers ago, Henry had fallen while climbing the black
boulders in Salvage Cove, just beneath his family’s house.
It was a long fall, ten or twelve feet.
If he had fallen a bit to the right, he would have landed on
sharp stone wedges that would have broken whatever hit them. If
he had fallen a bit to the left, he would have landed on sharper
mussel beds that would have cut him up.
But he landed right between them, into calm water whose tidal
current gently led him back into shore. At dinner that night,
Franklin said that he guessed he should teach Henry how to climb.
He’d show him how to set his hands and balance his footing. He’d
show him how to test rock holds and how to use his fist as an
anchor in a fissure. And maybe, if he got good enough, he’d take
him up to Katahdin.
Maybe they’d even climb through the Gateway and up to the
Edge. “That would be something to see, little brother,” he’d
said, and he’d reached over and rumpled Henry’s hair.
Henry almost bowed down and did worship.
And Henry’s her said again, “If you build your house far
enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” That
was why Henry wasn’t ready for it on the evening of his
fourteenth birthday, while he adjusted the straps of the backpack
his parents had given him so he could show Franklin how prepared
he was for their hiking trip up Katahdin, because Franklin had
finally, finally, finally agreed to take him, even though he told
Henry that he’d never make it, that he’d have to quit halfway up
the ain, that they’d have to turn back, that he was only
going because their her wanted him to take his little
brother—who, Franklin said again, would never make it. On that
night, looking out the north parlor window, his parents standing
beside him and holding back the curtains, Henry couldn’t
understand why the town’s one patrol car was moving slowly down
their drive, heading toward their house. It had been a spring
colder than usual, and the trees were still unleafed, so they
could see the patrol car’s red light revolving and...
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