I read the companion novel to Gary D. Schmidt‘s Okay for Now just because I like to read things in order. But once I had read The Wednesday Wars (TWW) I was worried that the expectations that excellent book set up would be too high for this recent release. I was wrong.
I enjoyed Okay for Now a great deal. It is similar to TWW in many ways, and connected through a shared character, but is different enough to stand on its own and shine.
Here is the Publishers synopsis:
“The Dump” is what Doug Swieteck calls his new home in upstate New York. He lands there in the summer of 1968, when the Apollo space missions are under way, Joe Pepitone is slugging for the New York Yankees, and the Vietnam War is raging. At home he lives with a father who has lost his way and a brother accused of robbery. And Doug’s oldest brother is returning from Vietnam. Who knows what wounds his missions have given him?
But Doug has his own mission, too, and it begins when he first sees the plates of John James Audubon’s Birds of America at the local library. His mission will lead him to Lil Spicer, who shows him how to drink a really cold Coke, to Mrs. Windermere, who drags him to a theater opening, and to the customers of his Saturday grocery deliveries, who together will open a world as strange to him as the lunar landscape.
Two books in an I am a big Gary D. Schmidt fan.
