The Blue Star: A Novel

The Blue Star: A Novel
by Tony Earley

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Book Summary Information

Author: Tony Earley
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-10
ISBN: 0316199079
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Book Reviews of The Blue Star: A Novel

Book Review: A Gold Star Novel
Summary: 5 Stars

Jim Glass, the hero of Tony Earley's novel JIM THE BOY is now a senior in high school in rural North Carolina mountain country when THE BLUE STAR begins, is experiencing first love as only the young can as the United States is about to enter World War II-- The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor about half way through the story, an event that will surely affect the lives of all the young men of Jim's graduating class.

Tony Earley holds up a gentle but unflinching mirror to show us a time and place in our nation's history that is forever gone: the poor, isolated, sometimes prejudiced section of the country we call Appalachia. The character Dennis Deane, upon being told that the Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor, is unaware what Pearl Harbor is although he manages to get a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant the first time they have sex. Chrissie Steppe, whom Jim loves madly, bears the brunt of racial prejudice because her father "Injun Joe," is a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. Poverty is never far from the most successful of families, whether it is those who till the land or the "lintheads" who live and work in the horrible mill towns.

In often deceptively simple but evocative prose-- although he can certainly turn a phrase when he chooses to do so-- Mr. Earley in this sweet though never saccharine novel has created a group of memorable characters, some of whom will tear the heart right out of you. Be prepared for your eyes to burn. In addition to Jim, there are his three bachelor uncles who look out for his welfare at every move he makes; his mother who wishes he would marry Norma, a good girl whom he does not love; Chrissie, whom he does; Dennis and Ellie Something; and even Miss Brown, Jim's high school history teacher who entreats him not to forget the "conquistadors" he has studied in her class.

Having grown up in this part of the United States, I can say that Mr. Earley gets his facts, expressions and sayings right, whether it be "daggummit," "doggone," "daggum" or "chifforobe." Jim's mother makes a quilt from flour sacks. His family eats pinto beans and cornbread. They attend a brush arbor revival where the preacher might take up a love offering. They may joke that they are going to see a man about a dog. Finally, Jim reads Zane Grey and likes the Lone Ranger.

THE BLUE STAR, named after the banner that families of servicemen hang in their windows to show to the world that they have a family member fighting in battle, is about war and its effect on families, poverty, growing up and, although it is almost too trite to say, how love can have such a salutary effect on the uncertainty associated with going to war as well as the starkness of poverty. Jim's love-filled homelife is in sharp contrast to that of Chrissie's. There is a particularly moving scene in the novel where she tells him that there is a lot in the world to feel bad about. Jim answers that he had never thought that way; to the contrary, there are a lot of things in the world to feel good about.

Even though Mr. Earley writes about a long ago era and place, the story is timeless. Norma's commencement address, for example, so full of hope but so full of platitudes, as she talks about leaving our "small, but beloved home" and going into the bigger world, is echoed in thousands of high school auditoriums every spring across this country. And a son or daughter's going off to fight in a foreign land is just as raw and painful today as it was in 1941. The universality of THE BLUE STAR brings to mind Thornton Wilder's classic OUR TOWN, a play that never grows old and continues to delight and move each new generation. Mr. Earley's depiction of this section of North Carolina is reminiscent-- though certainly not derivative-- of some of the best novels of Reynolds Price, another North Carolina writer who writes beautifully about ordinary, blue-collar people, many of whom never leave the towns and villages where they were born.

Mr. Earley has been quoted as saying that in JIM THE BOY he tried to create a story that his grandmother could read-- as I recall-- and not be embarrassed, The same could be said of THE BLUE STAR. The strongest language in the entire novel is a couple of "damn's." As I finished it, I felt a profound sadness that my deceased father, another lover of Zane Grey novels, who was a few years older than Jim when this novel takes place but not too old to be drafted into World War II, cannot read it. He would have found the characters and what happens to them to be just the way it was.

THE BLUE STAR, even better than JIM THE BOY, is a fine example of why reading good literature will never go out of style.

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Summary of The Blue Star: A Novel

Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Tony Earley's bestseller Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in another tender and wise story of young love on the eve of World War Two. Jim Glass has fallen in love, as only a teenage boy can fall in love, with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw's girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the Navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie's heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven, and gives a young man's emotions a grown man's gravity. With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a favorite novel for thousands of readers, Tony Earley has fashioned another nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time--making it again even realer than our own day. This is a timeless and moving story of discovery, loss and growing up, proving why Tony Earley's writing "radiates with a largeness of heart" (Esquire).

Tony Earley's first novel was Jim the Boy and The Blue Star is its sequel. Time has moved forward to the eve of World War II, but everything else is much the same in the countryside of North Carolina. Jim Glass is now a senior in high school, living in the peaceful haven of his three uncles and his mother.

Love complicates his otherwise halcyon life, in the person of one Chrissie Steppe. We can't help whom we love, and Jim has made a big mistake by falling for Chrissie. She and her mother are in what amounts to indentured servitude up on the mountain, living on the property of the influential Bucklaws. Their son, Bucky, is in the Navy and expects that Chrissie will wait for him. She has nothing to say about it because she and her mother have nowhere to go if they are turned off Bucklaw's land because Chrissie has other ideas.

Earley's books are charming and evocative, calling back another time in this country when life was simpler, except in the realm of human emotions, which do not change with the times. He has a way of creating a time and place exactly as the people experiencing it would have felt, putting the reader in the picture. Finishing this book, the reader wonders what World War II and its aftermath will hold for Jim the boy, who is now a man. Perhaps Earley will tell us. --Valerie Ryan