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Overview
Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Tony Earley's bestseller Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in another tender and wise story of young love on the eve of World War Two. Jim Glass has fallen in love, as only a teenage boy can fall in love, with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw's girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the Navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie's heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven, and gives a young man's emotions a grown man's gravity. With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a favorite novel for thousands of readers, Tony Earley has fashioned another nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time—making it again even realer than our own day. This is a timeless and moving story of discovery, loss and growing up, proving why Tony Earley's writing "radiates with a largeness of heart" (Esquire).Synopsis
Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Tony Earley's bestseller Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in another tender and wise story of young love on the eve of World War Two. Jim Glass has fallen in love, as only a teenage boy can fall in love, with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw's girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the Navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie's heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven, and gives a young man's emotions a grown man's gravity. With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a favorite novel for thousands of readers, Tony Earley has fashioned another nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time--making it again even realer than our own day. This is a timeless and moving story of discovery, loss and growing up, proving why Tony Earley's...
The New York Times - Scott Turow
I galloped through the novel and relished every page…Earley knows Jim and his world with a sureness and an intimacy that always mark the most involving fiction…Earley's simple prose is always informed by Jim's good heart. Jim, the McBrides and Aliceville so thoroughly fulfill our era's longings for the news of good lives lived by faith in one another that The Blue Star, like its hero, is irresistible. If there is a third installment, I will be in line at the bookstore when they open up the boxes.
Editorials
Scott Turow
I galloped through the novel and relished every page…Earley knows Jim and his world with a sureness and an intimacy that always mark the most involving fiction…Earley's simple prose is always informed by Jim's good heart. Jim, the McBrides and Aliceville so thoroughly fulfill our era's longings for the news of good lives lived by faith in one another that The Blue Star, like its hero, is irresistible. If there is a third installment, I will be in line at the bookstore when they open up the boxes.—The New York Times
Ron Charles
The novel builds slowly to…more serious themes—probably too slowly…[The] late chapters are as good as anything Earley has ever written—unashamedly sweet and pure and sad—but I'm worried that only patient readers will hang on to reap these rewards. That would be too bad because by the end I was enthralled again, and the novel left me eager for the story of Jim's adventures in World War II.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
The small dramas of teenage love get caught in the crosswinds of a war in this sequel to the 2001 bestseller Jim the Boy. It's late summer 1941, and Jim Glass, now a high school senior, has an earnest, unshakable passion for classmate Chrissie Steppe. But as straightforward as his feelings are, the circumstances of his nascent romance are complex: Chrissie's family is indebted to their landlord, whose sailor son Bucky claimed Chrissie as his girl before shipping out to serve on the USS Californiaat Pearl Harbor. Throughout Jim's fraught final year at school, he relies on the advice of his uncles, but after Pearl Harbor is bombed, they can't protect him from the war's toll. Questions of patriotism, sexuality and poverty weave their way into a narrative that's deceptive in its simplicity: the growing pains that Jim and his friends experience pack a startling emotional punch. (Mar.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
Beautifully told, this old-fashioned love story is the kind of fiction readers have come to expect from Earley after his luminous, warmhearted first novel, Jim the Boy. Here readers reencounter the main character of that novel and the sleepy rural community in North Carolina where he lives. Jim is now a senior in high school who finds himself on the verge of adulthood and attracted to a young woman of Cherokee descent named Chrissie Steppe. Their relationship blossoms from infatuation to love, and Earley handles this developing romance with great tenderness and emotional warmth. The novel is set during the ominous early years of World War II, and foreboding historical events infuse Jim and Chrissie's situation with considerable poignancy and pathos. Earley also brings to life a very appealing rural community, conjuring up a portrait of a bygone America where people conducted themselves with dignity and devoted themselves to simple virtues and values. Enthusiastically recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ12/07.]
—Patrick Sullivan