“Time was like a fishing line that gets all caught in the reel, looping back into itself and tangling into knots that are forever. And the days’ stories were all knitted in tangles, so that I could hardly remember one day from another.”
No one who has read Gary D. Schmidt’s novels or our previous reviews will be surprised that this book deals with some very difficult circumstances. But this is Schmidt’s first book, so the themes we have come to expect in his “middle school boy” stories are shadows in this one.
Cole Hallet says about the time since his mother died, “Two years [he and his Dad] had stuck it out together, in a hushed life.” Then Dad decided they should leave Pennsylvania and move to Cole’s Emerson grandparents’ (his mother’s parents) farm in Albion, New Hampshire. Cole’s mother is buried there, as the Emersons have been for many generations. Cole will be near his roots and will get to know his grandparents better.
While Cole is getting to know his grandparents, making friends, learning the rhythm of farm life and the ways of a small town, Dad is spending more and more time in his room. He comes out for meals less and less often until it becomes so rare for him to talk to anyone that it is a surprise to Cole and his grandparents when he does join them for anything.
The Emerson family history is intertwined with that of most of the families in town, so Cole learns the stories almost everywhere he goes. Cole is fascinated that it seems like everyone has a story about the Sin Eater. A sin eater is a person who is said to take on the sins of a recently dead person by ritually eating a meal with the sins somehow baked into it. Stories about Albion’s Sin Eater also attribute to him the ability to physically heal people or to take their sorrow onto himself.
Cole doesn’t believe anyone could do these things, but he still wonders what happened to the Sin Eater and why he is woven so tightly into the stories of the town’s past. Though it’s nearly impossible to piece his story together over 100 years later, Cole does come to the conclusion that the Sin Eater did bring healing to the Emerson family before he died.
Though hard things happen to Cole, and around him, the tone of this story is more restrained than others of Schmidt’s, such as The Wednesday Wars. We see the beginnings of some of Schmidt’s favorite themes, but they aren’t as highly strung. Cole finds two good friends during the summer before school starts. He starts the school year in a new middle school, but he isn’t troubled by much besides a mean coach. The story flows through the distinct seasons of Cole’s first year in Albion. He has to deal with crotchety old neighbor ladies and the life of the town that includes church and relationships rooted in past generations. Through everything that happens, Cole is surrounded by caring, stable adults who allow him to grow but not to be alone.
Often, Cole seems like a quiet narrator rather than a dynamic actor. I think that if this had been the first of Schmidt’s books I had read, I would have thought, “Well, that was nice,” and not gone on to find more. Like all of Schmidt’s books, however, this one is told with beautiful imagery and brilliant flashes of poetry. It ends with reconciliation and love. Cole asks his grandfather why they should bother remembering the old stories if none of them ever repeat.
“Grandpa looked right at me. ‘So we can know who we are. So we can share one another’s lives, and somehow carry one another’s lives. So we know how to live.'”
What parents need to know:
Cole’s mother is dead when the story begins.
His Dad commits suicide on Christmas Eve. He shoots himself while everyone is at church, and Cole’s grandmother finds him when she goes to see why he hasn’t come downstairs to help decorate the Christmas tree. Cole and his grandpa know by the sounds from upstairs that something is wrong, but Cole isn’t allowed to go upstairs. He never sees his Dad dead, and there is no more explanation than that, “I looked past [Grandma’s] shoulders across the kitchen. The gun rack over the door was empty.”
Cole’s mean Coach is an overweight, out-of-shape man who has a heart attack at school after shoveling snow. Cole and some of the other boys see him die when they go into his office to find out why Coach hasn’t come into the gym for class.