Book #105: Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy

Title: Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy
Author: Gary D. Schmidt

I tried hard not to get too depressed while reading Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. In my Young Adult fiction workshop, we're all writing novels. My novel takes place on an island in New England where a group of people is cut off from the rest of society. Lizzie Bright also takes place on an island in New England where a group of people is cut off from the rest of society. The difference is that my novel, still in its first draft, is basically wordy crap, and Schmidt's novel is both spare and brilliant. 

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy focuses on the relationship between Lizzie, an African American girl living on a small Maine island, and Turner Buckminster, the new preacher's son, freshly arrived from Boston just after the turn of the 20th century, and finding it hard to fit into life in the coastal Maine town where his father has taken a job. Turner doesn't fit in with the other boys in town, but he does fit in with Lizzie, also an outcast. The men in Turner's town, the very men who hired Turner's father to be their preacher, want to turn the African Americans living on Lizzie's island out, claiming that they don't have property rights to the island despite having lived there for more than a hundred years, because the townspeople feel that having an island full of African Americans will make the town less desirable as a resort destination.

Gradually, Turner begins to see that adults in his life don't always make the right choices, and that he must decide for himself what is right and what is wrong, and what it means to be a man. Schmidt does such a great job with the setting of the book, and with repeating certain lines (looking into the eye of a whale, for instance), and with the maturation of characters over the course of the novel. It's definitely a book that I want Bryce and Annie to read, and one that I'm happy to have read myself.