The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer

Based on Paulsens real life experiences as a migrant worker and carny after running away from home at the age of 16. ( )

Ilene Cooper (Booklist, July 2000 (Vol. 96, No. 21))
He's known only as "the boy." Readers meet him twisting away from his drunken mother as she crawls into his bed and follow until he enlists in the army. In between is the ultimate coming-of-age story, told in language that is as clean as bleached bones. But beneath the quiet, direct telling there is every earthy emotion--hunger, exhaustion, fear, passion. After his mother's drunken attempt, the boy runs away and finds work in a beet field, hard, backbreaking work. Mexican migrant workers share their food and teach him about responsibility to the group: he climbs to the rafters and wrings the necks of pigeons so he can add to the cooking pot. He leaves the beet fields when he spies a girl named Lynette, but he never sees her again. He's picked up as a runaway by a deputy who steals his money, then hitchhikes with a man who is killed when a bird flies into the car's windshield. A woman who has lost her son befriends him, but he leaves her to join the carnival--where he sets up and breaks down, shills for the geek who bites the heads off chickens, and has his first sexual experience with Ruby, the carnival's exotic dancer, who helps him learn what it's like to please a woman. Paulsen has visited some of this personal material before, but showed it in a softer light. This time the story is gritty and unblinking. If this were just an uncompromising look at a boy's sixteenth summer, it would be involving. It's Paulsen's ability to put readers behind the boy's eyes--so they can feel what's going on as well as see it--that makes this novel exceptional and so heartbreakingly real. Category: Older Readers. 2000, Delacorte, $15.95. Gr. 9-12. Starred Review.