Jim the Boy - Tony Early

jim the boy
tony early
c. 2000
256 pages
completed 7/22/2010

read for: tbr challenge

*may contain spoilers*

During the night something like a miracle happened: Jim's age grew an extra digit.

Jim is a boy living in a small town in North Carolina during the Great Depression. During the year he turns ten his life teaches him lessons on friendship, family, and what it means to be a man.

It's been a little while since I finished this book. My head has been in another space the past week since I just moved to a new apartment in Seattle with my sister the literature scholar. So this review is probably going to be a little short. I should have written it closer to when I had finished it.

This was a very quiet little book. Much of it was very sweet and somewhat idyllic: a small boy living with a mother and uncles who love him whose biggest problem seemed to be a competition with another boy from school to see who was better at everything. Things took a bit of a turn at the end and Jim came in contact with some much bigger issues (poverty and polio among other things). For the most part, though, I was reminded of books like Little Women and Little House on the Prairie with simple episodic life lessons.

4/5