Trouble

March 31, 2008
Tautly constructed, metaphorically rich, emotionally gripping and seductively told,Schmidt’s (The Wednesday Wars
) novel opens in the 300-year-old ancestral home of Henry Smith, whose father has raised him to believe that “if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” With such an opening, it is inevitable that Trouble does find the aristocratic Smiths: Henry’s older brother, Franklin, is critically injured by a truck. A Cambodian refugee named Chay, who attends the same school as Franklin, acknowledges responsibility, but over the course of Chay’s trial it occurs, to Henry at least, that it was Franklin who sought Trouble: the racism he directed toward Chay specifically and Cambodian immigrants generally has been so widely shared in the community that no one challenged it. Twin sequences of events plunge the Smiths and Chay into further tragedy, also revealing the ravages of Chay’s childhood under the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, a storm exposes a charred slave ship long buried on the Smiths’ private beach: it emerges that their house has been close to Trouble all along. For all the fine crafting, the novel takes a disturbingly broad-brush approach to racism. Characters are either thuggish or willfully blind or saintly, easily pegged on a moral scale—and therefore untrue to life. Ages 12-up.

July 1, 2008
This recording is an excellent way to experience Schmidt's coming-of-age novel of tragedy and grace. Fourteen-year-old Henry Smith lives in a privileged seaside community and attends an exclusive private school -- his father believes such insulation will protect the Smiths from trouble. But when Henry's older brother is hit by a pickup truck and a young Cambodian immigrant turns himself in, Henry learns the hard way that trouble is unavoidable. Narrator Culp's reading is straightforward and low-key, providing a welcome counterpoint to occasional excesses of coincidence or symbolism, and his portrayal of the likable, struggling Henry is completely convincing. Listeners will find that this audio version accentuates both the book's considerable emotional quotient and Schmidt's gorgeous prose, whether describing the scenery of Maine's Mt. Katahdin or illuminating the human condition.

(Copyright 2008 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)