March selection: The Blue Star

We read Tony Earley's charming Jim the Boy the first year of this club's existence. Now we turn to its sequel, The Blue Star. About the two books, a New York Times reviewer wrote:

In an interview eight years ago, Earley described Jim the Boy as “a children’s book for adults,” and The Blue Star has a similar feel. It’s such a deceptively simple strategy — to take the unembellished storytelling style of children’s literature and to bend it to adult themes — that many novelists will feel like smacking themselves on the side of the head for not having thought of it themselves. But it is no easy feat, especially to stay inside the hazard lines of sentimentality.

USA Today says:

I'm happy to report that Earley's The Blue Star works as a sequel and a lovely coming-of-age story that can be savored on its own.

Earley's debut dealt with a year in the life of 10-year-old Jim Glass, guided by a widowed mother and three bachelor uncles in a tiny North Carolina town during the Depression.

The sequel covers Jim's senior year in high school. He's come to "appreciate that there were no older boys. He and his friends were it." It opens in the fall of 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor. World War I still is thought of as "The Great War."

Discussion questions