{POLL TALLY} Bluffton: My Summers with Buster Keaton by Matt Phelan - 5 stars

[Theresa]

Such an enjoyable story! It's summer, 1909 in Muskegon, MI, and Harry is lonely and bored, helping out at his father's hardware store and wondering how to fill his days until school starts again. He also seems lonely. Then the train arrives and off it comes. An elephant! Lots of lively noisy people! A zebra! And a boy about his age who leapt, tumbled, twisted and fell off the train, just full of energy and making moves unlike anything Harry had ever seen. An adult from the train yells 'Buster', all hustle off to the trolley that serves Muskegon Lake commnities, and Harry discovers all, including the elephant, zebra and boy, are heading to the last trolley stop: Bluffton, on the lake and next to the state park. Harry has just met the vaudeville troupe headed by the Keaton Family, summering in Bluffton while the NYC vaudeville theaters were closed during the sweltering summer heat.

This beautifuly drawn and written story is based on truth: Buster Keaton and his family and the vaudvilleans they performed with, summered in Bluffton until about 1938. The story covers about 3 full summers of Harry's friendship with Buster and the vaudvilleans, his envy of their life which he sees as so rich and desirable, his efforts to juggle, and in general growing up. The author is the artist and he uses a soft watercolour palette and tone to his art, a nice change from the black/white/grays that seem prevalent in the few other graphic novels I have read. The mood of the long slow summers as they appear to a young boy, the feeling of early 20th Century beach community, even the sense of emptiness and waiting throughout the rest of Harry's year, are well portrayed.

I've already added Phelan's other middle-grade books to my TBR.

I want to mention something, very emblematic of the sychronicity that sometimes happens when reading. This book revolves in part around a vaudeville troop which summers outside the cities where they perform (this was before A/C remember) in a lakeside community - essentially taking over some section of it. In Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr, With a New Preface by the Author, which is as much a history of comic theater, including vaudeville, as it is a biography, Bert Lahr and his first wife spend summers in a similar town on a lake in New Jersey. It was rather wonderful to encounter it yet again.