Dear Friends,
By the great horn spoon (as the 49’ers would say), there is nothing I enjoy more than packing a bag of snacks, laying a blanket out under a tree, and reading aloud to a passel of kids from a book about a capable, deep-thinking, adventurous twelve-ish-year-old boy. Tom Sawyer! Henry Alden! Brian Robeson! Reynie Muldoon! There’s nothing better than an afternoon spent in the company of such adventurers. Fortune-seekers one and all, such young protagonists commonly set out on some sort of quest, but it is not always a physical one and the fortune sought is not always money. But the story along the way is almost always one that will be full of both wisdom and surprises.
In this month’s Quick Book Notes, it is my pleasure to (re)introduce you to six of the very best boy protagonists in relatively American children’s fiction.1 I can’t be comprehensive here, so I’m choosing to focus in on protagonists of books that have stayed with me since my own first reading and which also resonate with my own children. Since I have always had a historical bent, these all take place in historical periods, as well.
As you may well note, I am not, nor have I ever been, a boy myself. It doesn’t matter. These stories of these boys will draw in children of both sexes; and why not? Cannot a girl as well imagine herself in medieval England with Elizabeth Janet Gray’s wonderful boy minstrel, Adam? Aren’t human stories of interest to us all? (But don’t worry — a post on girl protagonists is in the works, too!)
Above all, these adventurous boy characters show us how life experience and a willingness to meet moral challenges lead almost inevitably to growth in maturity, to the very first tastes of an adult kind of wisdom.
Now, I bet you think you know which book I’ll be starting with, due to my exclamation above…
But no! We’ll get to that one later. Why not start at the beginning, instead, with something a little bit more…ancient?
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