Gary D. Schmidt, who has been honored for two recent young-adult novels, will be the featured author at Junior Book %26amp; Author on March 15.
In its fourth year, Junior Book %26amp; Author gives young-adult and middle school readers the opportunity to listen to and interact with nationally known children’s authors.
Both of Schmidt’s novels share the themes of friendship, transition from childhood to adulthood, and the quest for equality. %26quot;Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy%26quot; (Yearling, $6.50, paper) is set in rural Maine during the early 1900s. Turner Buckminster and his family have moved from Boston so that his father can minister to a church in Phippsburg. Turner becomes fast friends with Lizzie Bright, a girl his age who lives in a black community on nearby Malaga Island. Both are outcasts, and their struggle for peaceable solutions and ultimate freedom is heart-wrenching. Nature plays a special role in the story, especially through the water, the gulls and the whales.
%26quot;The Wednesday Wars%26quot; (Clarion, $16) is set in suburban New York during the late 1960s. It’s the Vietnam era, and the country is experiencing a huge shift. This seems simple compared with the quakes seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood is enduring at his school. Each Wednesday afternoon, while all his classmates head out for catechism or Hebrew school, Holling, the class’s lone Presbyterian, stays behind with his teacher and studies Shakespeare. Mrs. Baker seems intent on making his life miserable, but she turns into a true mentor who surprises him on many fronts. This book has many serious moments, especially regarding Vietnam — Mrs. Baker’s husband is a prisoner of war — but there are hilarious episodes throughout.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch recently interviewed Schmidt.
Q: You received a 2005 Newbery honor award for %26quot;Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy%26quot; and a 2008 Newbery honor award for %26quot;The Wednesday Wars,%26quot; both works of historical fiction. Why these two time periods?
A: Not only the time period is different, but it really was an attempt to keep things completely different. I wanted to have a book for %26quot;Wednesday Wars%26quot; that was very, very different from %26quot;Lizzie Bright,%26quot; so not only is the time period different, 1912, 1967-68, the whole narrative framework is done so one is third person, one is first person. One is pretty serious stuff, and the second, %26quot;Wednesday Wars,%26quot; is more of a comedy.
Q: Names help define your characters. Do you make this a conscious part of your writing?
A: The names take me a long time to do. It is often well into the book before I know what the names are. Each of the names has to carry some weight, and it is not just weight for the reader — it is weight for me as a writer. It has to suggest something to me. Turner is taken from Frederick Jackson Turner, who wrote about the Western frontier. I thought that was appropriate at first because he had his head turned toward the frontier. Then his name, Turner, also takes on metaphorical properties because he is in the process of turning away from being a child and toward being an adult.
Q: You used nature so much through the book. The whales are characters. I wondered why you particularly chose the whales?
A: There is something when you are close to a whale, there is something so massive, so powerful. But it is not just that. There is a sense of consciousness. I wanted Turner to confront this strong reality that is in this natural landscape that forces him to look at things straight on. He is confronted by something that is larger than he ever could have imagined. Which is sort of what has happened on this island and the mainland, too, when he has to confront the racism that goes on. At first he isn’t ready. He tries but can’t. But at the end, he is ready to confront the large things of this world, and so they wait for him. He goes out and actually touches the whale, and he’s blown away by this, but he’s ready for it. Having done that, he can go back and, in a sense, share it.
Q: What about the issue of equality that definitely runs in the book?
A: The [Richmond] lecture is going to be %26quot;The Great American Question.%26quot; For 350 years or so, it has been the same question — that’s it: %26quot;How do I live next to someone who’s different from me?%26quot; In 1912, there was the same question being asked, and they answered it very poorly, so it is about equality. Later on in %26quot;Wednesday Wars%26quot; the question is, %26quot;How do you see someone not as a symbol or as another but as an individual human being who stands shoulder to shoulder to you?%26quot;
Sue Harris is a Prince George County reading specialist and a Virginia Commonwealth University adjunct reading faculty member.
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