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Summary
Summary
2013 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award
It's 1899 in a small town in Vermont, and the turn of the century is coming fast. According to certain members of the church where Robbie's father is the preacher, the end of the century might even mean the end of the world. But Robbie has more pressing worries. He's sure his father loves his simple-minded brother, Elliot, better than him, and he can no longer endure the tiresome restrictions of Christianity. He decides to leave the fold and become an "apeist" and, just in case the church whisperers are right, resolves to live life to the fullest. His high-spirited and often hot-headed behavior does nothing to improve his father's opinion of him, nor does it improve the congregation's flagging opinion of his father. Not until the consequences of his actions hurt others does Robbie put a stop to the snowballing chain of events he has set off and begin to realize his father might love him despite his wayward tendencies.
Summary
A new century is fast approaching ...
... but will the year 1900 mean the end of the world, as some say) Robbie Hewitt isn't certain. What he does know is that he wants to get in as much living as possible between now and the new year, just in case-which includes running Mabel Cramm's bloomers up the flagpole on Decoration Day, and taking a ride in a real motorcar. Robbie doesn't care that his antics leave his preacher father and the upstanding citizens of Leonardstown, Vermont, heartily unimpressed. But when his high spirits and hot temper entangle him in a scheme that damages far more than his father's reputation, Robbie must choose whether to take responsibility for his actions -- a decision that holds the life of a man in the balance.
Author Notes
Katherine Paterson was born in Qing Jiang, Jiangsu, China in 1932. She attended King College in Bristol, Tennessee and then graduate school in Virginia where she studied Bible and Christian education.
Before going to graduate school, she was a teacher for one year and after graduate school, she moved to Japan to be a missionary.
Her first book, Sign of the Chrysanthemum was published in 1991. Other titles to follow included The Bridge to Terabithia and Jacod Have I Loved which both won her a Newbery Award, The Great Gilly Hopkins, Lyddie and The Master Puppeteer.
In addition to the Newbery Award, she is the recipient of numerous others including the Scott O'Dell Award, the National Book Award for Children's Literature, the American Book Award, the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults Award and the New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year Award. She was also honored with the Hans Christian Anderson Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Katherine Paterson was born in Qing Jiang, Jiangsu, China in 1932. She attended King College in Bristol, Tennessee and then graduate school in Virginia where she studied Bible and Christian education.
Before going to graduate school, she was a teacher for one year and after graduate school, she moved to Japan to be a missionary.
Her first book, Sign of the Chrysanthemum was published in 1991. Other titles to follow included The Bridge to Terabithia and Jacod Have I Loved which both won her a Newbery Award, The Great Gilly Hopkins, Lyddie and The Master Puppeteer.
In addition to the Newbery Award, she is the recipient of numerous others including the Scott O'Dell Award, the National Book Award for Children's Literature, the American Book Award, the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults Award and the New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year Award. She was also honored with the Hans Christian Anderson Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (10)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Narrator Johnny Heller does an excellent job reading Katherine Paterson's rich and funny look at the trouble-making Robert "Robbie" Burns Hewitt (HM, 1999), a 10-year-old preacher's boy who experiences a loss of faith. Set in 1899 in a small Vermont town, Robbie faces the turn of the century with great concern. Will the world end just as the visiting fire-and-brimstone preacher says it will? Deciding that he only has a few months to live anyway, Robbie makes a conscious choice to disobey the Ten Commandments and engage in some Tom Sawyeresque adventure. Paterson masterfully juggles a variety of tone shifts. For the most part, Preacher's Boy is a high-spirited romp about wild youth. Yet Paterson also laces the story with a sense of sadness, especially in a sequence when Robbie sees his father cry, and in the subplot involving a homeless girl named Violet. The author does not shy away from hard questions about God and spirituality, but the novel rarely feels didactic. The story ends on a hopeful note that does not feel forced. Heller has fun with Paterson's vibrant language, and is especially successful at conveying Robbie's rambunctious attitude and his handicapped brother's gentle spirit. The cover artwork depicting a rather androgynous child in denim does not do justice to Paterson's tale. What happened to Barry Moser's original artwork? Paterson's prose and Heller's narration make this coming-or-age story first-rate.-Brian E. Wilson, Evanston Public Library, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia; Jacob Have I Loved) captures the essence of an adolescent's fundamental questions of God and existence in this finely honed novel. As the year 1899 draws to a close, the people in Robbie's rural Vermont community anticipate the coming of the 20th century with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Some fear that the end is near. Others, like Robbie's father, a minister with progressive ideas, thinks "the world's at a sort of beginning." Robbie does not know what to believe. Recently, he has begun to question God and the validity of the Ten Commandments. As the son of a preacher, he is expected to exhibit exemplary behavior, but he cannot seem to turn the other cheek to those who make fun of his "simple-minded" brother. In a fit of anger, Robbie comes dangerously close to drowning a boy and sets off a chain of irreversible events; he must rely on his conscience to lead him toward redemption. Once again placing universal conflict in a historical context, Paterson gives a compassionate, absorbing rendering of an adolescent boy trying to break free from social and religious constraints. Besides delving into the mind of the young rebel, she successfully evokes the climate of the times, showing how the townspeople respond to modern inventions, discoveries and ideas. The story contains a moral, but the author remains nearly invisible as she guides her characters through crises, then leaves them to fend for themselves at the dawn of a new era. Ages 10-14. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate) Katherine Paterson borrows Mark Twain's voice and a healthy bit of his wit to relate the adventures of Robbie Hewitt, whose favorite literary characters are, not surprisingly, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Robbie's penchant for mischief is a worrisome embarrassment to his father, the Congregational minister of their small Vermont town at the turn of the last century, while Robbie himself chafes at the town's unrealistic expectation that as a preacher's son he is supposed to be clean ""all the time, not just on Sundays"" and good. ""I don't have a talent for either,"" he maintains, ""nor wish to."" Although he craves the attention his father gives to his mentally retarded older brother and envies the closeness that exists between his mother and his two sisters, he can't resist his more devilish impulses-like running Mabel Cramm's bloomers up the flagpole on Decoration Day, or tipping a spider down the back of Mrs. Weston's dress at church. But when he almost drowns another boy in a murderous rage, he shocks not only his loyal friend, Will, but also himself. In a narrative that shuttles skillfully between sentiment and farce, that combines moments of painful insight with uproarious action, Robbie runs away to hide from the consequences of his temper and comes across a pair of vagrants in the woods. His interactions with the resourceful Violet and her drunken lout of a father lead Robbie to initiate and then abandon a phony kidnapping scheme, contribute to his first thrilling ride in a motor car, and bring about, eventually, retribution for his sins and rapprochement with his father. In a sly reminder that the past is prologue, Katherine Paterson ends this absorbing historical fiction novel with Robbie and the Reverend Hewitt pulling the rope on the church bell and ringing in the new century together. A more rounded and complex character than Jip, whose story takes place in much the same locale only a few decades earlier, Robbie Hewitt emerges as one of Katherine Paterson's most engaging characters. n.v. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Paterson (Celia and the Sweet, Sweet Water, 1998, etc.) rings out the 20th century with this ruminative tale of a 10-year-old freethinker, set in a small Vermont town at the very end of the 19th century. Hearing a revivalist preacher's dark hints of impending doom, Robbie decides to become ""a heathen, a Unitarian, or a Democrat, whichever was most fun,"" because he ""ain't got the knack for holiness."" As it turns out, he's not very good at sinning either, bending a few commandments by stealing food for a pair of vagrants, Violet and her abusive, alcoholic pa, Zeb, and feeling a stab of envy over the love his parents lavish on his simple-minded older brother, Elliot. He has a brush with serious evil, nearly drowning a rival who throws his clothes into a pond; the experience leaves him profoundly shocked at himself, and he ultimately earns redemption, in his own eyes, by saving Zeb from a charge of attempted murder. Despite some violence, the tone is generally light; if some situations are contrived, more thoughtful readers will look beyond them to the larger moral questions underlying Robbie's attitudes and choices. Talky, but nourishing for mind and spirit both. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 5^-7. Paterson is arguably the premier author among children's book writers today, and Preacher's Boy is another in a long list of titles (but not so long as to dilute her talent) that shows why. In this story, she takes a serious philosophical topic--what God wants from us and what we want from God--and shapes its profundity with irony and wit. It is the turn of the twentieth century, and Robbie, son of a preacher, is tired of trying to please God. Moreover, although Robbie's father is kind and gentle, it's not that easy to do what he wants, either. So when a fire-and-brimstone minister suggests that the world may be ending soon, Robbie decides that whatever time is left will be more fun without God in the equation. Like Huckleberry Finn (of whom there are many overtones), Robbie is willing to take his chances with eternity for the opportunity to do what he wants. But before long, Robbie has put his mentally disabled brother in danger, almost choked another boy to death in a fury, and masterminded a harebrained kidnapping hoax that might result in a man's execution. At every turn, Paterson splendidly balances Robbie's moral choices with pure entertainment, especially as it twists the plot. And though there are a couple of stereotypical characters, including a dirty vagabond girl and her drunkard father, even they are elevated because Paterson writes about them with humor and compassion. As the public demands more books with moral issues at their core, here's one that envelops readers with its principled reflections, instead of pounding them over their heads. --Ilene Cooper
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Narrator Johnny Heller does an excellent job reading Katherine Paterson's rich and funny look at the trouble-making Robert "Robbie" Burns Hewitt (HM, 1999), a 10-year-old preacher's boy who experiences a loss of faith. Set in 1899 in a small Vermont town, Robbie faces the turn of the century with great concern. Will the world end just as the visiting fire-and-brimstone preacher says it will? Deciding that he only has a few months to live anyway, Robbie makes a conscious choice to disobey the Ten Commandments and engage in some Tom Sawyeresque adventure. Paterson masterfully juggles a variety of tone shifts. For the most part, Preacher's Boy is a high-spirited romp about wild youth. Yet Paterson also laces the story with a sense of sadness, especially in a sequence when Robbie sees his father cry, and in the subplot involving a homeless girl named Violet. The author does not shy away from hard questions about God and spirituality, but the novel rarely feels didactic. The story ends on a hopeful note that does not feel forced. Heller has fun with Paterson's vibrant language, and is especially successful at conveying Robbie's rambunctious attitude and his handicapped brother's gentle spirit. The cover artwork depicting a rather androgynous child in denim does not do justice to Paterson's tale. What happened to Barry Moser's original artwork? Paterson's prose and Heller's narration make this coming-or-age story first-rate.-Brian E. Wilson, Evanston Public Library, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia; Jacob Have I Loved) captures the essence of an adolescent's fundamental questions of God and existence in this finely honed novel. As the year 1899 draws to a close, the people in Robbie's rural Vermont community anticipate the coming of the 20th century with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Some fear that the end is near. Others, like Robbie's father, a minister with progressive ideas, thinks "the world's at a sort of beginning." Robbie does not know what to believe. Recently, he has begun to question God and the validity of the Ten Commandments. As the son of a preacher, he is expected to exhibit exemplary behavior, but he cannot seem to turn the other cheek to those who make fun of his "simple-minded" brother. In a fit of anger, Robbie comes dangerously close to drowning a boy and sets off a chain of irreversible events; he must rely on his conscience to lead him toward redemption. Once again placing universal conflict in a historical context, Paterson gives a compassionate, absorbing rendering of an adolescent boy trying to break free from social and religious constraints. Besides delving into the mind of the young rebel, she successfully evokes the climate of the times, showing how the townspeople respond to modern inventions, discoveries and ideas. The story contains a moral, but the author remains nearly invisible as she guides her characters through crises, then leaves them to fend for themselves at the dawn of a new era. Ages 10-14. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate) Katherine Paterson borrows Mark Twain's voice and a healthy bit of his wit to relate the adventures of Robbie Hewitt, whose favorite literary characters are, not surprisingly, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Robbie's penchant for mischief is a worrisome embarrassment to his father, the Congregational minister of their small Vermont town at the turn of the last century, while Robbie himself chafes at the town's unrealistic expectation that as a preacher's son he is supposed to be clean ""all the time, not just on Sundays"" and good. ""I don't have a talent for either,"" he maintains, ""nor wish to."" Although he craves the attention his father gives to his mentally retarded older brother and envies the closeness that exists between his mother and his two sisters, he can't resist his more devilish impulses-like running Mabel Cramm's bloomers up the flagpole on Decoration Day, or tipping a spider down the back of Mrs. Weston's dress at church. But when he almost drowns another boy in a murderous rage, he shocks not only his loyal friend, Will, but also himself. In a narrative that shuttles skillfully between sentiment and farce, that combines moments of painful insight with uproarious action, Robbie runs away to hide from the consequences of his temper and comes across a pair of vagrants in the woods. His interactions with the resourceful Violet and her drunken lout of a father lead Robbie to initiate and then abandon a phony kidnapping scheme, contribute to his first thrilling ride in a motor car, and bring about, eventually, retribution for his sins and rapprochement with his father. In a sly reminder that the past is prologue, Katherine Paterson ends this absorbing historical fiction novel with Robbie and the Reverend Hewitt pulling the rope on the church bell and ringing in the new century together. A more rounded and complex character than Jip, whose story takes place in much the same locale only a few decades earlier, Robbie Hewitt emerges as one of Katherine Paterson's most engaging characters. n.v. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Paterson (Celia and the Sweet, Sweet Water, 1998, etc.) rings out the 20th century with this ruminative tale of a 10-year-old freethinker, set in a small Vermont town at the very end of the 19th century. Hearing a revivalist preacher's dark hints of impending doom, Robbie decides to become ""a heathen, a Unitarian, or a Democrat, whichever was most fun,"" because he ""ain't got the knack for holiness."" As it turns out, he's not very good at sinning either, bending a few commandments by stealing food for a pair of vagrants, Violet and her abusive, alcoholic pa, Zeb, and feeling a stab of envy over the love his parents lavish on his simple-minded older brother, Elliot. He has a brush with serious evil, nearly drowning a rival who throws his clothes into a pond; the experience leaves him profoundly shocked at himself, and he ultimately earns redemption, in his own eyes, by saving Zeb from a charge of attempted murder. Despite some violence, the tone is generally light; if some situations are contrived, more thoughtful readers will look beyond them to the larger moral questions underlying Robbie's attitudes and choices. Talky, but nourishing for mind and spirit both. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 5^-7. Paterson is arguably the premier author among children's book writers today, and Preacher's Boy is another in a long list of titles (but not so long as to dilute her talent) that shows why. In this story, she takes a serious philosophical topic--what God wants from us and what we want from God--and shapes its profundity with irony and wit. It is the turn of the twentieth century, and Robbie, son of a preacher, is tired of trying to please God. Moreover, although Robbie's father is kind and gentle, it's not that easy to do what he wants, either. So when a fire-and-brimstone minister suggests that the world may be ending soon, Robbie decides that whatever time is left will be more fun without God in the equation. Like Huckleberry Finn (of whom there are many overtones), Robbie is willing to take his chances with eternity for the opportunity to do what he wants. But before long, Robbie has put his mentally disabled brother in danger, almost choked another boy to death in a fury, and masterminded a harebrained kidnapping hoax that might result in a man's execution. At every turn, Paterson splendidly balances Robbie's moral choices with pure entertainment, especially as it twists the plot. And though there are a couple of stereotypical characters, including a dirty vagabond girl and her drunkard father, even they are elevated because Paterson writes about them with humor and compassion. As the public demands more books with moral issues at their core, here's one that envelops readers with its principled reflections, instead of pounding them over their heads. --Ilene Cooper