It's a sublime moment that even finding the terrified Charlie doesn't surpass, nor Joe's invitation to a dance. Dismayed because she's learned he was innocent, she hesitates over the words to say so, whereupon Joe tells her a story-of a guru who for twenty-eight years has been searching for "some great wise word"-and she gets the point and, smiling, says she's sorry. Then Charlie gets lost and Joe, a gentle knight plus something of a saint, insists on helping Sara find him. For fourteen years she had "loved her sister without envy, her aunt without finding her coarse, her brother without pity." Now that "I'm not anything" (pretty or smart or athletic), ten-year-old Charlie is "retarded" and everyone else is contemptible-especially classmate Joe Melby, suspected of having taken Charlie's prized wristwatch. A subtly told story, echoing the spoken and unspoken thoughts of young people.įrom the February 1971 Horn Book Magazine.With increasing frequency juvenile fiction is contracting to the dimensions of a short story and the endoskeleton (dialogue, stage directions, asides to the audience) of drama-of which the climax to Sara's season of discontent is a good example. The same stones, shaken, no longer made the same design.” Then, one warm night, Charlie, unable to sleep, slipped out in the darkness and disappeared and at the end of an anguished, unforgettable day of searching, Sara knew that she had found even more than a terrified, lost little boy.
It was as if her life as a huge kaleidoscope, and the kaleidoscope had been turned and now everything was changed. “She was doing the same things she had done last summer…and yet everything was different.
She experienced a new self-consciousness, a feeling of being clumsy, too tall, and hopelessly unattractive unwillingly she envied the serenity of her pretty, older sister and Charlie, dependent and often importunate, seemed to be a constant concern. Sara, in her fourteenth summer, felt the rhythm of her life break down and anger, confusion, and discontent rush in. But seldom are the pain of adolescence and the tragedy of mental retardation presented as sensitively and as unpretentiously as in the story of Sara and Charlie, the brain-damaged younger brother she loved so protectively. The demand for realism in children’s fiction continues to call forth a spate of problem books, some of them relatively successful, some scarcely more literary than case histories.
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