recommended for: grades 5 - 8
Fifteen year-old Russell Culver has one dream that will take him out of the rural area where he has grown up: escape to the Dakotas for harvest time where the work is meaningful and pays well -- and best of all, gets him out of school! But destiny and Pa Culver have other plans for Russell. This school year is going to be different. After Ms. Myrt tragi-comically passes on to her reward, the new teacher is none other than Russell's older sister Tansy, who has been privileged to study at the distant high school. Between Pa and Tansy and fate itself, Russell is forced to spend another year at home, and in doing so, comes to learn much more about the people around him, his family and his own inner self.
Author Richard Peck is well-known for his humorous yet accurate renderings of young adults in historical moments that engage today's reader. This title is another successful title: the early 1900s in rural Indiana are portrayed authentically and with accuracy. The reader is transported to the time and the period when schools were single buildings with a privy close by. Transportation is by horse, if one is mobile, and the new-fangled automobile is viewed with suspicion and concern. Mr. Peck's exceptional ability for the language and nuances of living in the times is spot-on in this work, and readers will enjoy the chance to see life through a more innocent and community-based time.
I was familiar with Peck's work through the historical fiction The ghost was mine, a story of young Daisy who becomes somehow connected with the ghost of a young girl who was on the Titanic at the time of its tragic end. The humor in this Teacher's funeral is less overt but nonetheless present as it lightens and makes attractive the narrative of a young man's life a century ago. Middle school readers will enjoy this look at life that still allows for narrative surprises and laughs.
Key words: rural Indiana, one-room schools, harvest, early threshing machines
