Book Recommendation: THE OUTCASTS OF 19 SCHUYLER PLACE

Along with updates about what's happening in language arts, once in a while I'm going to post book recommendations here.  I love to read and share books, so this seems like a great way to do exactly that!

Before I get to this first review, let me get this out of the way: I’ve admired e.l. konigsburg since I read From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  It’s not as if I’m the only one who fell in love with this book—it won a Newbery Medal—but it’s one of the books I read when I was young that has stuck with me.  If you haven’t read From the Mixed Up Files, you should.

What’s awesome about e.l. konigsburg is that she has continued to write and publish wonderful books—she’s won two Newbery medals, the second twenty-nine years after the first.  A couple of years ago, I came across her book The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place.  A title like that I couldn’t resist.  I picked it up, read it, and immediately decided that it had to be a book I kept close, as I knew I’d be returning to it often.  It’s funny and inspiring and smart.  I’ve read it several times—the mark of a truly beloved novel.

The story’s protagonist is twelve-year-old Margaret Rose Kane, who’s been sent to Camp Talequa (or “warehoused” there, as she puts it) while her parents are in Peru.  Margaret ends up in a cabin of “alums,” girls who’ve been to Talequa before.  Trouble begins when Margaret refuses to give up her bunk to an alum, and it escalates when she tells the alums she doesn’t want a nickname (as her uncle Morris once told her, your name “will stop bullets if you let it”).  Margaret quietly decides that she will not participate in the “warm companionship” Talequa has to offer.  In fact, she will participate in nothing at all.  She responds to the increasing desperate and irritated efforts of Talequa’s camp director with a simple, “I prefer not to."

When Margaret’s uncles hear about the “problems” Margaret’s having at Talequa, her Uncle Alex comes to retrieve her.  He arrives wearing “wing-tipped, leather-soled oxfords; a long-sleeved, button-up shirt; suit jacket; necktie; and a Borsalino hat.”  His truffle-hunting dog Tartufo accompanies him.  In short, Uncle Alex, like his brother Uncle Morris, is astonishingly wonderful.  But what the brothers have created in their yard is even more astonishing.

I’m not going to try to describe the towers that the uncles built in their yard.  I will say this: Margaret Rose Kane loves them.  And while Jacob Kaplan—son of the infamous camp director—tells Margaret “’Only a dead soul wouldn’t [love them],’” there are people who want the towers torn down.  And when Margaret discovers this plot—the plot of the town council of Epiphany—she resolves to stop it. 

One of my favorite moments in the novel takes place when Margaret remembers an encounter between one of her uncles’ neighbors and her Uncle Alex.  The uncles have just finished touching up the towers with orange-sherbet paint, when their neighbor, Geoffrey Klinger calls the towers an “off color joke.”  Margaret remembers:

Uncle Alex said to him, “The towers are a joke, Mr. Klinger.  They would be useless if they weren’t.”  To which Geoffrey Klinger replied, “You and I have very different definitions of useless.”  To which Uncle Alex replied, “And jokes.”

This exchange captures the way Konigsburg mixes defiance and humor into a warm and inventive brew. The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place is about some of my favorite things: art and family and inspiration and taking-on-the-world.  But it’s the characters who make it hum.   

So go and find The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place.  It’s not only a great novel for kids and teenagers, it’s great for artists and parents and dreamers and shakers.  Go.  (Though of course, in homage to Margaret, I must add, if you “prefer not to,” that’s okay with me too.)