Rating: WORTHY!
For a Newbery/Printz book, which I normally avoid like the plague, this one started out surprisingly well. Whether it would remain that way then became the question because Newbery books have been pretty much universally rotten in my experience. It was a surprise therefore, to discover that this one was different.
The basic material is of great interest. This fiction is rooted in yet another shameful example of abusive treatment visited upon "minorities" by US governmental agencies and supposedly god-fearing locals who despite their Christian platitudes, behaved unforgivably and abominably.
This book is pure fiction, but the facts are these: in 1912, the US state of Maine, after initially seeming to behave reasonably towards the island community, suddenly evicted the residents and razed their homes. They even went to the trouble of digging up 17 graves, dumping the bones in five coffins, and reburying those at the School for the Feeble-Minded in Pownal, Maine. Eight of the residents were also deemed to be feeble-minded, when it was actually the governor of the state who was retarded. The rest of the forty or so residents of mixed race, were gone by then, taking their shacks with them. This happened in the summer, not in the winter as is misleadingly depicted in this novel.
Them's the facts. It's known quite well who was on the island, and photographs of some of the residents can be found on the Internet. Some of their descendants are living today. The fiction is that Lizzie Bright Griffin is one of the black residents on Malaga Island, which is located at the mouth of the New Meadows River in Casco Bay, Maine. She eventually meets the son, Turner, of the new pastor in Phippsburg, Reverend Buckminster (who's rather 'Fuller' himself LOL!) which is located close by, on the mainland (the Maine land?!).
Turner is not at all happy with life in this penny-ante town after having lived in Boston. They have a weird way of playing baseball here, and the other kids seem like they want to embarrass him, or even bring him to harm when they go 'swimming' with him. Swimming to these kids involves jumping forty feet into the waves above the rocks on the shore, where if you misjudged your jump and don't catch the wave, you're very likely to end up as gull fodder splattered on the rocks. Turner isn't happy and can't seem to do anything right.
He strikes up a friendship with Lizzie, and the adventures the two have are unexpected. About two-thirds the way through, I started to get the feeling that this atrocity was starting to get whitewashed, and some of that feeling still lingers, but the ending turned it around sufficiently, shamelessly fabricated though it was, for me to rate this as a worthy read - or more accurately a worthy start to learning more about an awful pogrom. To the best of my knowledge, there was no Lizzie Bright or anyone like her, and there was no Turner Buckminster or anyone like him. Had there been a Lizzie Bright just like this one she would not have suffered the fate she did, so that rang a bit false for me, but it did make a solid point, and for that I can forgive it. I'll never forgive the jerks who stained human history with these events.
There is an odd undercurrent to the writing: that reading Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species..." was what put fire in Turner's veins - not what was happening to the people on Malaga! but evolution? It made no sense. I've read On the Origin... and despite the revolution is engendered, frankly, it's tedious! It's far more likely to put tire than fire into anyone's veins. Why the author didn't have Turner read Thomas Paine's Age of Reason instead, is a mystery. I did appreciate the sentiment that hard science, and not blind faith is what's actually going to save us - if blind believers such as the creationists will quit trying to trip it up and disembowel it, but the author really didn't get that part right. That aside, I felt this was, overall, a worthy read.
