The Paper Cowboy by Kristin Levine - ADVISABLE

Levine, Kristin The Paper Cowboy, 352 p. Putnam (Penguin), NOVEMBER 2014.  $17.  Violence: PG (belt whipping, bullying); Mature Content: G; Language: G.  

Tommy was supposed to burn the last piece of trash that morning, but his sister Mary Lou did it for him.  Now she’s in stuck the hospital for months, while her burns and skin grafts heal.  Tommy doesn’t want to look soft in front of his best friend Eddie, so he bullies the boy in his class with the scars on his face.  When Tommy finds a Communist newspaper during a paper drive, he shows it around instead of burning it like his sister told him to, then uses it to play a dirty trick on a shop owner he doesn’t like. Now he is seeing Communists everywhere and has probably ruined someone’s life.  Tommy wants to be like the heroic cowboys he sees in the movies, but he can’t seem to choose good; he always seems to be messing up somehow. 

Life in America during the McCarthy era Communist witch-hunts is an unknown time for today’s students.  Levine weaves in so many details about every day life and key thought patterns and opinions; she breaths life into this time period, which most kids probably only know from the squeaky-clean T.V. shows from the era, if at all.  The scenes with Tommy’s Mom, as she slips towards mental illness, are painful to read, but going back to re-read them, I realized they are not as long nor as graphic as I made them in my mental movies the first time I read them.  The 1950’s are more than 60 years ago, but are still not a big part of any K-12 curriculum.  If a teacher wanted to introduce the time period, this would be a good read-aloud.  I don’t think it will have a large checkout audience, just because historic fiction is never an easy sell.  But It is an excellently crafted book; I will sell it by hand to students who are more curious about the past, and talk to some teachers about it.  Plus it has a male main character, and Levine brings complexity and depth to his choices and experiences.  Personally, I was fascinated during the entire book - I will probably read it again, just to experience the time period again; Levine really helped me connect with the entire town and reminded me of the complexity of a time period that predates me. 

EL, MS - ADVISABLE.  Cindy, Library teacher