­­­­­Richie’s Picks: LIAR & SPY by Rebecca Stead, Wendy Lamb Books, August 2012, 192p., ISBN: 978-0-385-73743-2

“When your day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, well hang on”
-- REM, “Everybody Hurts”

“The first thing Dad does is hang the Seurat in our new living room. It’s not a real Seurat, because that would make us millionaires. It’s a poster from a museum. I feel a little better as soon as I see it on the wall above the couch, exactly where it always was at home.
“Two summers ago we went to Chicago, where the real painting takes up one entire wall of the Art Institute. What you can’t tell from our poster is that the picture is painted entirely with dots. Tiny little dots. Close up, they just look like blobs of paint. But if you stand back, you see that they make this whole nice park scene, with people walking around in old-fashioned clothes. There’s even a monkey on a leash. Mom says that our Seurat poster reminds her to look at the big picture. Like when it hurts to think about selling the house, she tells herself how that bad feeling is just one dot in the giant Seurat painting of our lives.”

Thanks to his architect father having been laid off from his job last year, Georges (named for that famous artist, Georges Seurat) and his parents necessarily leave their Brooklyn home and move into a nearby apartment building. It is in the apartment building that Georges meets Safer, a boy who is homeschooled and who is the founder of the Spy Club into which Georges is immediately initiated by his new companion.

LIAR & SPY is a gentle, fun, and thought-provoking middle grade coming of age story that has me thinking of similar-aged guy main characters in a couple of old favorite stories of mine. The common thread is that all-so-important decision making about who one is going to be as a person.

In THE MISFITS by James Howe, seventh grader Bobby Goodspeed tells his friends, “’My dad says it’s better to just get along, not make waves. He says bringing attention can be a dangerous thing.’” Bobby initially identifies himself this way, which is in direct contrast to the beliefs of his lifelong friend, the outspoken Addie Carle. Bobby’s growth in THE MISFITS involves his decision to no longer be a get-along guy.

In THE ROCK AND THE RIVER by Kekla Magoon, thirteen year-old Sam Childs ponders whether to walk the path advocated by his father, a disciple of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or follow his older brother Stick, for whom the beliefs of the Black Panther Party are where it is at. Sam must decide whether to be the rock or the river.

“And then I think of all those thousands of dots Seurat used to paint the picture. I think about how if you stand back from the painting, you can see the people, the green grass and that cute monkey on a leash, but if you get closer, the monkey kind of dissolves right in front of your eyes. Like Mom says, life is a million different dots making one gigantic picture. And maybe the big picture is nice, maybe it’s amazing, but if you’re standing with your face pressed up against a bunch of black dots, it’s really hard to tell.”

Here, there are pluses and minuses to Georges’s embracing his mom’s philosophy of accepting the bumps in life and, instead, looking at the big picture. Certainly, one cannot control the weather and so it is best to be philosophical about acts of God. But there are plenty of other situations -- like bullying at school -- where the question is whether one’s accepting the unacceptable is virtuous or is selfish and short-sighted.

I am fond of booktalking THE MISFITS and THE ROCK AND THE RIVER to middle school students. Here, I will be pitching the equally-rich yet slightly more innocent LIAR & SPY to the fourth and fifth graders who are on the cusp of their middle school experiences.

Richie Partington
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
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