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Loading... Jim the Boy (2000)by Tony Earley
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A lovely sweet story about a boy. Jim Glass is five when the story begins and 11 at the end. We learn early in the book, on the first page, that Jim Glass Sr. has died suddenly at the age of 23. A week later Jim the boy is born. Jim lives with his widowed mother and her three brothers. Jim lives with four adults who love and care for him. The three bachelor uncles are afraid that they are not enough, that Jim needs a father. But the reader see that three loving uncles are more than equal to one living father. Jim learns about life, friendship and more . Jim lives in a tiny community in North Carolina during the 1930s depression. It seems a very limited place but Jim meets a variety of people including the mountain kids who start attending school with the town kids when schools are consolidated in his 4th grade year and the black hired hands who he works along with on the family farm. Jim the Boy is a quiet simple book but there is a lot more too it and it comes highly recommended by me. A year in the life of a 10 year old boy during The Depression, the perfect mixture of innocence and coming-of-age; a delicate balance of light and dark. Understated but beautiful. Lots of great metaphor. Earley has a way with words that looks and feels simple but that mastery is precisely what had me rereading sentences throughout the book. I especially loved Book II: Jim Leaves Home: The Wide Sea where buzzards grab the air with their wings, climbing the sky; fish vanish as if made of light; and Jim with feet in the ocean for the first time, trying to feel Belgium, instead feels the water writing strange words on his feet. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesJim Glass (1) AwardsNotable Lists
Both delightful and wise, Jim the Boy brilliantly captures the pleasures and fears of youth at a time when America itself was young and struggling to come into its own. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. Hachette Book Group2 editions of this book were published by Hachette Book Group. Editions: 0316198951, 0316199648 |
So why not five stars? Or at least four?
Well, I just felt like the story was a little too simple for my taste. It is a tale you could easily read aloud to a child. It could end up being a classic, but it really seems more like a series of short stories about Jim's life, and somehow the plotting was just too simple to really make me say "Wow!" at the end. The narrative does move along at a nice pace, but at the end, I just sort felt like, "oh, that was a lovely little tale.". And "a lovely little tale" just doesn't make me want to give it 5 stars.
This book is not one I'd choose, but my face to face book club is reading it as part of All Rochester Reads, where the whole town reads the same book. I just prefer more complexity to my books and characters. Jim is well developed, but no one else really is. It really just seemed like a platform to show how well Earley can evoke images without using a single stale word. Good for him! Now, if he'd just take it to another level plot wise, I'd think he was truly a masterful genius. ( )