In her second novel, Newbery Medalist Clare Vanderpool (Moon Over Manifest) treats readers to an inspiring coming-of-age odyssey set in the backwoods of Maine, just after World War II. She crafts a story about finding one's way through landscapes both mythical and real, while learning the true meaning of friendship.
When Jack Baker's mother dies, the 13-year-old finds himself uprooted from his home in Kansas. His father enrolls him in a boarding school in Maine, where he becomes an outsider "with nowhere to call home, at a school with no baseball, unable to row a boat straight." Then Jack meets Early Auden, a strange boy who lives in the school's basement and makes up stories about the number pi. Early understands loss: not only has he grown up without a mother, his father has died, and Early's brother, Fisher, is presumed dead after his squad was killed in France. But Early is certain that Fisher is still alive. He begins to search the woods north of the school, where he believes Fisher is waiting, lost. Jack, with a week of vacation looming, joins him on what becomes an epic and uplifting adventure.
Navigating Early starts slowly, but is intensely rewarding for those readers who persevere. As Jackie himself says, "Who would have thought that a motion-sick kid from Kansas would have embarked on a journey that included pirates, a volcano, a great white whale, a hundred-year-old woman, a lost hero, a hidden cave, a great Appalachian bear, and a timber rattlesnake--in Maine!" --Lynn Becker, host of Book Talk, the monthly online discussion of children's books for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators