Lizzie Bright and The Buckminster Boy

Lizzie Bright and The Buckminster Boy by Gary Schmidt
2005 Newberry Honor Book

Lizzie Bright and The Buckminster Boy is the moving tale of an unlikely friendship that develops against a backdrop of racism and self-serving interests that result in a de facto ethnic cleansing.  The protagonist, 12 year old Turner Buckminster, has just moved with his family to Phippsburg, Maine.  The year is 1912 and the town's fortunes are changing.  The shipbuilding trade that once supported the town is in decline and the townspeople are searching for another means of support.  Many see tourism as the way to go, but believe that the presence of the predominantly Negro community on the ajacent Malaga Island will deter tourists. 

As in many of Schmidt's books, the protaganist is a boy who is not quite an adolescent but not still a child.  He is in a new situation which challenges all that he has known before.  He is starting to form his own opinions and discovering that he may not be the person that others expect him to be.  In Lizzie Bright, the new situation is that Turner is new to town and not fitting in with the other children.  He befriends a Negro girl (Lizzie Bright)  from Malaga Island, which is met with strong disapproval from both his minister father and community members.  He finds that Lizzie and her family are good people with whom he wants to spend time, despite the opinions of others. However, the townspeople want Lizzie and her people off of Malaga Island, no matter what they must do to accomplish this.  A struggle of wills results, with Turner and his family being set against the townspeople. 

What I have loved about each of the three Gary Schmidt that I have read is the artful way in which he constructs a personal struggle against the backdrop of a larger world struggle.  Real life circumstances are woven with fictional situations in a manner that avoids preachy-ness or heavy-handed history lessons but instead allow us to view the events as a person living in that time might have experienced them.  Each personal struggle leads to emotional independence on the part of the young person, but they do not achieve this independence without the assistance of an influential adult.  I see this as a difference from most true "YA" books, thus placing his books in a middle category of neither books for young children nor older teenagers.  In typical YA books, adults have a very small role and have relatively little influence on the growth of the character.  In some ways, I find the influence of adults to be more true to reality, though many teenagers may not agree with this statement!

Lizzie Bright and The Buckminister Boy would be an excellent book for students in grades 5th through 7th or 8th.  The treatment of the residents of Malaga Island is shocking but provides an important lesson for more mature elementary and middle school students.

NOTE: I refer to African Americans in this journal entry as "Negros" as that is the word used in the book.