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This month The Edge of the Forest reviews Middle-grade novels
concerned with happiness and becoming happy in a less-than-perfect world.
Happy Kid!
by Gail Gauthier
reviewed by Camille Powell, Book Moot
Gail Gauthier must be hanging out with junior high kids. She has perfectly captured the academic, mental and emotional
state of that no-man's land we call Junior High in her new book, Happy Kid! I love this book; I am going to
nominate it for the Texas Lonestar List.
Kyle is an average kid just trying to survive at Bert P. Trotts "the gateway to Hell" Middle School. The previous year,
Kyle's tech ed. school project resulted in an accusation of bringing a weapon to school. His innocence was established but
the fallout over the incident carries over into the new school year.
In an effort to help him improve his attitude and get him off on the right foot, his mother purchases a self-help book for
him, Happy Kid: a Young Person's Guide to Satisfying Relationships and a Happy Meaning-filled Life!
Kyle is mortified but accepts his mom's offer to pay him a dollar for every chapter he reads. As the school year gets
underway Kyle wonders why the book keeps opening to the same chapter and only changes once that chapter's issue has been
dealt with in his life. How does the book seem to always know what help he needs?
As Happy Kid! takes place in school, testing necessarily comes into play. Gauthier has perfectly recreated the
environment of high-stakes state student assessment testing. Here they are called (wonderfully) the SSASies. I chuckled as
teachers pass out SSASie review sheets, in every class, on the first day of school. As one student says, "The schools are
being tested but we are taking the tests?"
Gauthier has also accurately captured the strange social world and tension that develops between "A" students
(honors/advanced), the regular kids, and the small, scary underclass of soon-to-be-criminals. Finding the right place to
sit at lunch the first day of school is a real crisis, and having the campus bully think you are one of his posse is serious.
Like many junior high faculties, the teachers at Trotts are slightly odd. (I have always wondered...do the teachers get that
way by teaching middle school-ers or are they already slightly nutty and therefore drawn to junior high?) Kyle's teachers
are achingly familiar. He has a great family complete with an obnoxious older sister. His mom is so anxious for him to have
a good year, she thinks a book can help him. His dad is slightly bewildered and trying to understand the two teenagers
under his roof.
As I read Happy Kid!, I was rooting for Kyle all the way. He is struggling to succeed in his advanced classes where
he has been placed by clerical error. He is also looking for some friends and time for any fun outside of school. Ultimately, Kyle must face a huge ethical dilemma, and he wants to do the right thing but he risks losing everything he has
gained.
My daughter is just out of junior high, and she (and I) found great truths in the pages of this story. As she read parts of
it aloud to me, we were limp from laughter. I could go on and on about all the aspects of this book I loved.
Just read it.
Scout
by Christine Ford
reviewed by Kelly Herold, Big A, little a
Christine Ford's Scout is an elegant first novel written in free verse. Scout, otherwise known as Cecelia, is
finding her way—in the woods ("Only I am the scout/In these woods") and in her new life after her mother has died.
In many ways, Cecelia is, and knows she is, a lucky girl. She has a father, a decent older sister who is actually kind to
her, and other family members who care for her. But to lose your mother is not easy, especially when your father is drowning
his sorrow in "his yellow birds,/all he makes anymore...made with metal and painted/to look like fine feathers."
Cecelia's own sorrow is displaced. She turns instead to a new friend, a friend whose life is even more difficult than hers. She
plays in the woods with this friend, a boy named Redbud. Ford writes,
His name is Redbud.
His head is shaved
so only his blond scalp shines.
He wears the same brown T-shirt
he's worn every Sunday afternoon
I've known him for the past four months,
and the same baggy, tan shorts
held up, not with a boy's belt,
but a cord, a cord cut from a matching set of blue blinds.
Redbud bounces between a home for children and a less attractive home with his father and grandmother. Redbud's father,
the "sergeant major," believes in discipline and rules with an iron hand. He also disappears for weeks at a time. Cecelia is
attracted to the terror of Redbud's household, and it takes an accident for her to see the truth of Redbud's home and of her
own clearly.
The accident, while horrifying and scary, leads to change—in Redbud's life and in Cecelia's. Cecelia's dad wakes up
(he tells her, "I expected you to be the sky and hold/all of us in your beautiful blue eyes, baby,/but I did not work,/only in my garden."), Redbud's situation is clarified, and Cecelia comes to terms with who she is. The final stanza of
Scout drives this point home beautifully:
I'll be right there,
I tell him, but
first I go into the bathroom
to wash my face
with cool, bubbly water.
It's when I look up
that the mirror opens up
and on the other side is me,
and it is enough.
Happy Kid!, by Gail Gauthier. Putnam, 2006. ISBN: 0-3992-4266-X.
Scout, by Christine Ford. Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2006. ISBN: 0-3857-3234-1.
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