In The Blue Star, Tony Earley picks up the story of Jim Glass—which he began eight years ago in Jim the Boy—as a senior in high school in Aliceville, North Carolina in the early 1940’s.

Jim is contending with an increasingly complex world. School is mostly fun and being a senior certainly has its privileges. But more sober realities — relationships, love, decisions, race, class, war, the past, the dead (who even speak from the grave), and the uncertain future—reveal themselves and demand Jim’s response.

How does the boy respond? Will he begin to assume responsibility? Earley suggests that having a community helps. Jim’s mother and the three uncles with whom he lives give him a model for how adulthood looks and the stability and love that allow him to press forward, however awkwardly, into what he must become. Jim must learn how to live.

Wendell Berry, who has much to say about another boy, Huckleberry Finn, grappling with growing up, elsewhere writes, “A young person, coming of age in a healthy household and community, will understand his or her life in terms of membership and service.”

If you haven’t read Jim the Boy, start there and read straight through The Blue Star. It’s an easy and enjoyable read since the books maintain an almost juvenile form. Their stylistic simplicity can at first be deceiving, but before long you realize that Tony Earley is describing experiences that are all too familiar. It’s this recognition that leads to the conclusion that The Blue Star is more than good young adult fiction, it’s good fiction.

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