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Summary
Summary
A boy who spent three days trapped in a well tries to overcome his PTSD and claustrophobia so he can fulfill his dream of becoming a famous chef in Andrew Smith's first middle grade novel.
When he was four years old, Sam Abernathy was trapped at the bottom of a well for three days, where he was teased by a smart-aleck armadillo named Bartleby. Since then, his parents plan every move he makes.
But Sam doesn't like their plans. He doesn't want to go to MIT. And he doesn't want to skip two grades, being stuck in the eighth grade as an eleven-year-old with James Jenkins, the boy he's sure pushed him into the well in the first place. He wants to be a chef. And he's going to start by entering the first annual Blue Creek Days Colonel Jenkins Macaroni and Cheese Cook-Off.
That is, if he can survive eighth grade, and figure out the size of the truth that has slipped Sam's memory for seven years.
Author Notes
Andrew Smith is the author of several novels for young adults, including Winger , Stand-Off , 100 Sideways Miles , and the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Grasshopper Jungle . He lives in a remote area in the mountains of Southern California with his family, two horses, two dogs, and three cats. He doesn't watch television, and occupies himself by writing, bumping into things outdoors, and taking ten-mile runs on snowy trails. Visit him online at AuthorAndrewSmith.com.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sam Abernathy's parents have just skipped him from sixth to eighth grade, the first step, they say, in getting him into MIT. This puts him in the same grade as James Jenkins, the boy he blames for the three days he spent trapped in a well when he was four years old, an event that has defined his life in Blue Creek, Tex. Sam is not interested in MIT, and dislikes survival camping with his enthusiastic father; what he wants most is to leave his small town and become a chef, a goal he pursues secretly to avoid disappointing his parents. Smith (Winger) makes his middle grade debut in this aggressively quirky story that feels overstuffed with cleverly written plot details (mini golf, armadillos, bank robbers, gospel music, aliens) that compete with as often as complement each other. Passages detailing Sam's time in the well offer uncertain connection to the rest of the story and raise more questions than they answer. The well-developed elements shine-as in Smith's YA novels, repeating jokes become funnier over time-but the book fails to coalesce even as it succeeds in over-the-top entertainment. Ages 8-12. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
At age four, Sam fell into an abandoned well. Now eleven, Sam has skipped two grades and is battling his national-news-making past--and his parents--to fulfill his dream of becoming a chef. As the story moves between Sam's ordeal in the well (with an acerbic talking armadillo) and the present day, unrealistic characters mar the promising premise. The heartfelt ending, however, infuses the story with warmth. (c) Copyright 2019. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
With his newest book, YA author Smith takes the leap into middle-grade fiction and lands at the bottom of an abandoned well. There, readers meet Sam Abernathy, the story's protagonist, who's joined occasionally by a talking armadillo named Bartleby. Sam narrates his own story with a clearly established voice, bouncing between his memories of being stuck in a well when he was 4 and being an 11-year-old suddenly stuck in eighth grade. He contends with small-town memory (in which he will forever be the kid in the well), having classes with hulking James Jenkins (who is clearly a murderer), being forced to go on survival campouts with his father, and having parents set on him attending MIT when he actually wants to be a chef. As he wades through these middle-school agonies, memories from his three days in the well a blank until now begin coming back. In a story threaded with humor and surreal touches, Sam faces some big truths about himself and his life that will give readers something to chew on between the laughs.--Julia Smith Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ADOLESCENCE IS HARD ENOUGH, but how are you supposed to handle trauma in the family when your parents are overwhelmed, absent, overbearing or just plain oblivious? Anger and grief have a way of hijacking your mind and heart, so when you can't get through to parents, you do what the tweens in these middle-grade novels do: Find a distinctive way of dealing with it, and learn that grown-up thing of putting on a good face even if you're crumbling inside. IN LINDSEY STODDARD'S RIGHT AS RAIN (Harper, 304 pp.,$16.99; ages 8 to 12), the traumatic event is the sudden death of Rain's teenage brother, Guthrie. At their relentlessly optimistic mother's behest, they move from Vermont to New York City, while their father slips into depression. They arrive in Washington Heights dazed, a non-Spanish-speaking white family in a Latino neighborhood, and over the next two weeks - the time of the novel - a lot happens: Rain enrolls in a new middle school, joins the track team, qualifies for the city championship, enlists her stuporous father in building a community garden, and hopes that her parents will be the "one in four" couples that survives the death of a child. Stoddard has a knack for writing strong, feisty protagonists, like the heroine in her first book, "Just Like Jackie." Although Rain is wounded by her brother's death and anxious about her parents' arguments, she is a self-assured problem solver. She has a thing for numbers: She counts - bricks, miles, minutes, anything - to "empty her brain" and finds solace in running. Stoddard's exploration of grief's grip on a family rings true and tender; she does a remarkable job of conveying the emotional haze Rain's outward confidence hides. Lovely, dreamy chapters (each entitled "That Night") flicker through the novel, chronicling Guthrie's final hours and revealing the guilt Rain feels over his death. There, we see Rain at her vulnerable best: saving herself, if not her parents' marriage. carter JONES'S parents' marriage will not survive the death of a child - that we know early on. In Gary D. Schmidt's pay attention, CARTER JONES (Clarion, 224 pp., $16.99; ages io to 12), 12-year-old Carter's heartbroken family is propped up by an endearing visitor: an English butler who worked with their grandfather. The dapper, cultivated Mr. Bowles-Fitzpatrick attends to Carter, his three younger sisters and a vomiting dachshund, while their mother sorts out the death of 6-year-old Currier and the absence of her soldier husband. Carter is a good, compassionate kid, but he's torn up inside and steamed by his father's lack of communication. Schmidt seamlessly fuses humor and tragedy here, as he did in his Newbery Honor book "The Wednesday Wars." The butler can be a "pain in the glute" and a "blabber," Carter tells us, while Mr. Bowles-Fitzpatrick gently chides that you should never "begin your sentence with a subordinating conjunction," like "because." The repartee takes the edge off the loneliness Carter feels: "When you carry stuff like this around, you never know what kind of day it's going to be." It's striking that Schmidt chose cricket to put a spin on the boy-as-athlete motif. During a crucial match Carter's grief spills over. He has flashbacks of his most recent encounter with his father, on a camping trip after Currier died. The place had poisonous snakes, crocodiles and screeching birds, and Carter confronted his father for being absent when Currier was ill. Now, as the lengthy cricket match proceeds, he hears people in the crowd telling him to "pay attention," which is precisely what his father was unable to do. One suspects that Carter, as he grows, will be more attentive to those emotions. He already is. there's no overt trauma in Aida Salazar's debut novel, the moon within (Scholastic, 240 pp., $16.99; ages 8 to 12), but the circumstances leading up to a Mexican-Puerto Rican black girl's initiation into womanhood include anger and an overbearing mother. Celi is seething at her Mima for insisting on a "moon ceremony," an indigenous coming-of-age ritual to celebrate a first period. Lately, Cell's "flor" (as her mother calls it) tingles when she's around Iván, whom she knows from a cultural center in Oakland. So when Mima overshares by telling Iván what a moon ceremony is, Celi stands by feeling "like someone is stepping / on my chest / my breath stolen away." Meanwhile, Cell's best friend, Magda, is entering puberty a different way, taking the name Marco and identifying as male. The gender transition seems smooth enough - until Iván insults Marco and Celi laughs. Ashamed at putting her crush before her best friend, she stows it in her "heart locket" - the imaginary place she puts her deepest feelings. Salazar tells the story in free verse, which works well to convey Cell's emotions, giving them a powerful, beautiful charge ("Mimaleavesmetocry / sittingin a soup / of hummingbird herbs and rage"), and less well for dialogue ("What you doing next week, Celi? / Iván asks suddenly. / You wanna go to the skate park?"). Although the novel has been compared to Judy Blume's "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret," an instant classic in 1970 for its frank expression of how girls feel about their changing bodies, Salazar's book, half a century on, is less saucy: Where Blume's girls exuberantly chanted "We must! We must! We must increase our bust!," Celi wilts with embarrassment when Mima calls her father to celebrate that "our girl is growing breasts!" Salazar's take on menstruation is contemporary and important, however: It presents families of mixed-race heritage embracing ancestral traditions (Celi eventually does), accepting gender fluidity and acting generally body-positive. Marco, raised Magdalena, has a ceremony as well: one to celebrate his "Ometeotl energy / a person who inhabits two beings / the female and the male at once." For all that, Marco is still biologically female. Had he also gotten his first period, Salazar might have truly explored uncharted emotional terrain. SAM ABERNATHY FIRST APPEARED as a high school freshman in "Stand-Off," the second novel in Andrew Smith's Y.A. series "Winger." So THE SIZE OF THE TRUTH (Simon & Schuster, 272 pp., $17.99; ages 8 to 12) IS a prequel of sorts. As a 4-year-old in Blue Creek, Tex., Sam spent three days trapped at the bottom of a well, and the murky memory now shows up in his claustrophobia and his fear of the "murderer" James Jenkins, an eighth-grade boy he thinks pushed him into the well all those years ago. Now 11, Sam skips from sixth to eighth grade, where he struggles with being smaller than his classmates. He harbors a secret desire to be a chef, while his father wants him to go to M.I.T. and become a scientist. Smith's narration alternates between sections called "Eighth Grade" and hallucinatory sections rendering Sam's three days in the well, spent with a snarky armadillo (this is Texas) named Bartleby. Bartleby is a Yoda figure ("Don't go living your life only trying to avoid holes"), and there's a fantastical cantina-style scene, too: a choir of bats singing gospel music, a coyote waitress, Spanish-speaking otters and the coffin of a bank robber from 1888. The zany, philosophical conversation between Sam and Bartleby is sophisticated for a tween (yes, the armadillo utters his namesake's famous line), but it's thoroughly enjoyable: I happily would have read a book just about the two of them. Smith's delightful evocation of the weird and his ongoing exploration of masculinity show up in this novel, too. Sam's father, a kilt-wearing proprietor of a miniature golf course, takes him on survivalist camping trips. James Jenkins turns out to have a surprising passion other than football. He and Sam both have to face their fathers, and stand up for their less traditional choices. The truth, here as in all these engaging middle-grade novels, turns out to be large and complicated, made more so by growing up with loss and the heightened reality it brings. With ample reasons to succumb to grief or unhappiness, these undaunted tweens prefer not to. LENOR A todaro, an editor at Off Assignment, writes a column about New York City wildlife for Catapult Magazine.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-In his imaginative, though at times flimsy, middle grade debut, Smith explores the backstory of Sam Abernathy, who first appeared in the 2015 YA novel Stand-Off. Seven years after falling into an abandoned well, 11-year-old Sam Abernathy can't shake his reputation around town as "Well Boy," especially now that he is in the same class as James Jenkins, who was partially to blame for the well incident. On top of that, Sam is stuck living the life his parents have planned for him, and Sam's desire to become a chef is nowhere in their blueprints. As Sam seizes an opportunity to make his cooking dreams come true, he begins to piece together recollections of the past that change the way he sees his own life and the people in it. Though Sam is a likeable character, readers may struggle to find the depiction of him as a four-year-old believable. Sam's inner thoughts as well as his dialogue with Bartleby, the sassy armadillo whose role throughout Sam's life remains unclear, are more typical of a young teenager than a small child. Still, Smith manages to deliver a unique story with moments that are both endearing and humorous. Readers may appreciate seeing two young male characters who defy the expectations for masculinity set by the people around them in favor of pursuing their true passions. VERDICT Though it fails to reach its full potential, this is a feel-good story with a quirky edge that will leave readers with a smile.-Lauren Hathaway, University of -British Columbia © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Sam Abernathy is uncomfortable. He's uncomfortable in school, having skipped two grades to become the only 11-year-old in eighth grade. He's uncomfortable going on extreme survivalist camping trips with his dad. He's uncomfortable with the notion that his parents assume he'll be going to MIT when all he wants to do is become a chef. But none of this compares to the three days he spent stuck at the bottom of a well when he was 4. The novel toggles between Sam's subterranean adventure and his experience in eighth grade befriending the lumbering James Jenkins (the boy Sam blames for sending him down the well all those years ago). The two white boys embark on a curious relationship, and while the author is adept at filling in small details here and there with flourishes, the big picture does not coalesce. Are the flashbacks to preternaturally self-aware 4-year-old Sam's days in the well meant to represent reality? Or are they meant to be 11-year-old Sam's understanding of the events as he remembers them? Either way, how does the talking armadillo fit in? The shades of characterization given to Sam, his parents, and their small Texas town create a setting for an exploration of toxic masculinity that doesn't cohere. Sam's cooking is (anachronistically?) regarded by his father as stereotypically unmanly; James is forced to play football instead of dancing. Sam's coy repetitions of "(excuse me)" instead of curse words work against believable characterization. Smith's first middle grader is a frustrating misfire. (Fiction. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Size of the Truth BEING ALONE IN THE DARK, IN A HOLE, ON THANKSGIVING DAY, IS NOT MUCH FUN; OR, OH WELL! This all starts with my first enormous truth, which was a hole. When I was four years old, on Thanksgiving Day, I fell into a very deep, very small hole. There were things in that hole. Things besides just me and dirt. Some people can't remember anything at all from when they were four years old. It seems like most people's memories begin when they're in kindergarten or first grade. I can remember things that happened to me when I was only two. For example, I remember the first time I met Karim--just after he and his family moved into the house down the road from ours. That happened when I was two. But for years I could not remember what happened to me when I fell into that hole. Now I can. People say I'm smart. It's not my fault, though. I never tried to be smart. To be honest, which is something I always do try to be, I stopped being able to talk after I got out of the hole, so I started school late, when I was seven. It was like being in a race, where every other boy and girl had a two-year head start on me. At least Karim always stuck with me, until we couldn't stick anymore. The hole I fell into was an old well. In Blue Creek, Texas, which is where I live, everyone calls the hole an abandoned well, but that's a strange way to describe a well. Nobody ever lived there and then moved out of it. It wasn't a former pet, like a dog someone leaves out in the desert because they can't take care of it anymore. So it's hard for me to understand how a well can be "abandoned." What I fell into was a hole that nobody bothered to point out to me was still there and was also still a hole. A very deep one. That day, Karim and I were running around in the woods behind his house with some older boys from the neighborhood, playing a game called Spud with a soccer ball that had gone flat. If this older kid named James Jenkins, who nobody liked and everyone was afraid of, hadn't thrown the ball so high before Karim could catch it and yell Spud!, I would not have taken that last step (which wasn't a step, to be honest, since planet Earth was not beneath my foot), and I would not have been swallowed up by a hole. But that's what happened, and I fell. I felt my left shoe come off. Everything went dark. Somewhere above me, Karim yelled, "Spud!" And I kept falling. As scary as falling into an abandoned well might sound when you aren't in the middle of falling into one, I remember feeling far more confused than frightened as I slipped farther and farther down beneath the surface of Texas. Falling seemed to take forever. I hit things, and dirt got into my mouth and nose. My jeans twisted around, and my T-shirt got pulled up around my shoulders. Somehow, my feet ended up above me and my head pointed down. As I fell, I worried about Mom and Dad, and how they were going to be mad at me. I stopped tumbling. Everything smelled and tasted like dirt. And I was upside down, lying like a capital J, looking up at my feet and a fist-size patch of blue, which would have been the afternoon sky above the hole I fell through. I spit mud out of my mouth. I yelled. "Hey!" I tried to move, to pull myself up. "Karim! Hey!" Then the walls around my shoulders seemed to widen out, and I fell again. The second trip was shorter than the first, and this time I hit what must have been the flat bottom of the well. I lay on my side with my arms curled around my head. Little bits of dirt and pebbles sprinkled down on me from the walls above. It sounded like rain. I shut my eyes. That was when I started being much more scared than confused. It was also when I started to cry, which made mudslides all over my face. When you're four, it really isn't a big deal if you cry, right? I mean, unlike when you're a boy in middle school, when it becomes a completely different issue with all kinds of costly consequences. So I'm not embarrassed to say I cried. But let me make it clear: I was four, and I was at the bottom of a very deep hole. I didn't think I was hurt, but I wasn't really sure, either. I lay there for so long, just holding my head and trying to think about what had happened to me, and why this hole was here in the first place, but nothing made much sense. I was completely alone. It was Thanksgiving Day, and Mom and Dad were going to be so mad at me. I may have gone to sleep. Excerpted from The Size of the Truth by Andrew Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.