The Blue Star by Tony Earley

Originally published in Time Out New York, March 5, 2008

Those who enjoyed Earley’s 2001 critically heralded Jim the Boy won’t be disappointed by this sequel, which picks up in the early 1940s, seven years after the first book ends. Jim Glass, the bighearted title character of the previous novel, is now a senior in a rural North Carolina high school and determined to win the affection of a classmate, the half-Cherokee Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately for Jim, Chrissie already has a boyfriend: Bucky Bucklaw, the son of a prominent landowner, who plans to marry her as soon as he returns home from a tour of duty with the Navy.

Earley is no show-off: His chronicle of Jim’s journey into adulthood is thematically old-fashioned and peppered with homespun sentiments. “Being in love is like getting run over,” an uncle tells our teenage hero. “Sometimes it kills you and sometimes it don’t.” In the hands of most authors, this would be an aw-shucks disaster, but Earley’s well-wrought story line and sympathetic characters are charming rather than hokey or cloying. This backward-looking novel can also be deceptively contemporary: The Blue Star’s description of December 7, 1941, will remind readers of another date when American confidence was abruptly compromised.

The style and subject matter of Earley’s coming-of-age tale hearkens back to the classic coming-of-age fiction of writers like J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee. His voice is refreshingly earnest, and even comic characters like Dennis Deane, Jim’s rowdy best friend, are imbued with dignity. With its quiet sincerity, The Blue Star is a pleasant antidote to irony- and dysfunction-drenched books that rely on affectation or personal tragedy to get their points across.