I first read Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy when it was brand new in 2004, and I was an instant fan. Gary Schmidt has written terrific, award-winning books before and since, but I think Lizzie Bright is still my favorite. Maybe it’s because it’s about an outsider facing an unfriendly, uncaring world. I think most of us have felt like that at some time. I know I have.
Turner Buckminster had lived in Phippsburg, Maine, for almost six whole hours.
He didn’t know how much longer he could stand it.
And I’m not surprised. Phippsburg is a town where everyone has green shutters because everyone expects green shutters, where people point and laugh at other people, where every mistake Turner makes is known to the town and told to his father, where folks talk a whole lot about what God wants, which usually is what they themselves want: what will make them rich. Especially at the church, where Turner’s father is the minister. “The congregation, Minister,” his father was told, “will tell you what it thinks, and what it wants you to think,” and these words “wound like barbed wire around the Buckminsters.” No wonder Turner wants to light out for the Territories—and he does. Not literally or physically but by escaping the narrow-minded, greedy citizens of Phippsburg and thinking for himself.
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy is based on a tragic, shameful, true event in Maine in the early years of the twentieth century. Phippsburg’s traditional shipbuilding industry was dying, and the town fathers wanted to build a resort hotel on the bluff overlooking Malaga Island, a poor community founded by former slaves. But tourists were not likely to come to a place marred by “a ragtag collection of hovels and shacks filled with thieves and lazy sots...a blight on the town’s aspirations, a hopeless barrier to its future.” The community on Malaga had to go.
Thirteen-year-old Turner Buckminster III, new in town and the minister’s son, a boy with a talent for getting in trouble, is lonely and isolated until he makes friends with Lizzie Bright, granddaughter of the minister of Malaga Island. Belittled by the townfolks and forbidden by his father, Turner nevertheless grows close to the smart and spunky Lizzie.
“Lizzie Bright Griffin, do you ever wish the world would just go ahead and swallow you whole?”
“Sometimes I do,” she said, and then smiled. “But sometimes I figure I should just go ahead and swallow it.” And she held her arms out wide, as if she would gather it all in. And for a moment, Turned had no doubt that she could.
Gary Schmidt excels at bringing the natural world to life, almost as if the beaches and the surf, the sun and the snow, are characters in the story. The sea breeze appears in every important scene and can be “like a cat asking for a bowl of milk” or “solemn,” as when Turner’s father dies. It scoots and somersaults, “running and panting like a dog ready to play.” It steals the gold from the maple trees and the silver from the aspens or it just slinks away. It carries news up and down the street. It scatters old leaves around the foundation stones of the destroyed houses on Malaga Island. The breeze tells us to pay attention to what is happening and what it means.
But it is his human characters who are the most real and memorable as they face the challenges of their lives. I love Turner Buckminster III. I love Lizzie Bright and Mrs. Hurd and sometimes even Mrs. Cobb. I want to have them all at my house for strong tea with milk and lavender shortbread. Turner could play the radio, because I don’t have an organ. We would sing and talk and laugh, and I would never forget them.
Some characters, such as Turner and Willis and Reverend Buckminster, get a chance to grow and change through their challenges; some choose not to; others, tragically, do not have the choice or the chance.
Despite the lyrical prose and touches of humor, Gary Schmidt offers readers pretty heavy subject matter. People die. Old ladies and black kids are sent off to insane asylums. The pretense of godliness hides racism and greed. What I found most compelling was the depiction of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. In this town, the powerful are bullies. They are in control and demand unquestioning obedience. And the powerless? They were, in 1912, the African Americans, the poor, the elderly, and the children, groups that continue to fight today for justice and equality. Turner tries to help them. He tries to save Lizzie Bright and the other inhabitants of Malaga Island and that means standing up to the town—and his father. His efforts are hopeless and sad. The joy of the book is watching Turner fight hatred and greed as he learns tolerance, integrity, courage, taking responsibility for one’s decisions and mistakes, and, ultimately, forgiveness.
Were there clear-minded and courageous girls and boys like Lizzie and Turner Buckminster III in small New England towns a hundred years ago? I certainly hope so. And I hope there are still young people like them, who face hatred and intolerance with fire in their guts, who understand the importance of friendship and community and family, who dream about touching a whale, looking it in the eye, and understanding, as Turner does:
The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on. And there is nothing more woeful and soul-saddening than when they are parted....Everything in the world rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing.
I finished the book with delight and despair. Gary Schmidt made me cry, made me laugh, made me think, and made me want to write better books about more important things. And that is an awful lot for a reader to get from a book. I once heard Gary say that authors should “give [their] readers more to be human with.” With Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, he unquestionably succeeded.
Karen Cushman