Tony Earley

I am very torn about what rating to give this book. The story is about a young boy, Jim, who is being raised by a single mother and her three brothers during the depression era in the South. On one hand, it is very well written. Earley has a masterful and evocative writing style. You can picture everything he describes, and his writing is very fresh. He just brings the story of Jim to life in a beautiful way. There is nothing about the story that is forced or contrived. It's a simple tale, and you can finish this book in a day or two (I know because I did, and I'm not an especially fast reader).

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.… (meer)

Autumn 1941 sees Jim Glass begin his senior year of high school in Aliceville, a tiny town in rural North Carolina. Though aware of war that has yet to involve the United States, and therefore him, he’s more focused on his love life. Having recently broken up with Norma Harris, the prettiest girl in the school, because she’s a know-it-all and won’t kiss him, Jim falls hard for Chrissie Steppe, part Cherokee and wholly mature for her age, which Jim isn’t.

She’s also the girlfriend of Bucky, a boy who graduated the previous year and joined the Navy. Bucky’s father employs Chrissie’s family, which, in his case, also means he controls them. By all accounts, Bucky takes after his father, though with a little more polish. Jim knows him as a former baseball teammate, selfish on the diamond, and rumor has it Bucky assumes Chrissie to be his property; her feelings don’t matter.

The Blue Star is a sequel to the delightful, warm-hearted Jim the Boy, which depicts the protagonist at age ten, trying to understand the father who died the week before he was born. The boy’s three unmarried uncles do their best to teach him life lessons and spring him, when they can, from the shackles of his overprotective widowed mother.

In The Blue Star, they’re much the same, not taking themselves too seriously and attempting to pass that attitude onto Jim, with mixed success. Love is one thing a mentor can talk about all he likes; it’s the boy himself who’s got to get a grip on that slippery, elusive dynamite. Mama doesn’t make it any easier. She was certain that her beloved only child would marry Norma — apparently, in these parts, teenage romance is an immediate prelude to marriage — and can’t stop meddling to save her life.

As he did in Jim the Boy, Earley sets his scenes and emotional challenges in effortless, evocative prose.

Jim worries about Bucky and his nasty, irascible father, but makes his pitch to Chrissie anyway. He has the sense to ask questions rather than blather about himself or preen, but he often blunders. He doesn’t always know which questions can hurt, or why, or how they sound to a girl who’s shunned for her race and her poverty.

Earley’s approach to race in both novels bears a subtle touch; social barriers are so obvious, they need no explanation. Consequently, Jim, from a comfortable white family that insists on outward respect for all (yet still obeys societal rules without question), has never encountered the pressures Chrissie faces daily, nor has he even imagined them.

To his credit, however, when someone points out that if he married Chrissie, his children would be one-quarter Cherokee, he retorts that it doesn’t matter — they’d be half Chrissie’s. And when Chrissie and Jim click in funny, poignant flights of fancy, he’s subsequently bewildered to find their connection appears to have indelible limits. He believes with all his heart that Chrissie cares for him; why isn’t that enough?

Early captures youthful love in all its pains and awkwardness. Reading it, I winced in recognition several times, and I imagine others would too. Earley doesn’t protect his hero — Jim can be pigheaded, jealous, and selfish — but he has a good heart. True to life, he learns most when he can see past his self-regard, which, among other instances, makes him realize there’s more to Norma than he knew.

Bucky’s posting to Hawaii, this place called Pearl Harbor, feels portentous. Even so, Earley redeems the clunky plot device, for the emotional effects move his characters in unexpected ways, further proof that reversals need not rest on a plot point. The inner journeys of these characters, major or minor, count for everything.

The Blue Star is a marvelously colorful yet understated exploration of love, duty, sex, social prejudice, and what it means for a boy to become a man.… (meer)

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.… (meer)