Baby Got Books

Jim the Epic

Tony Earley’s “Jim series” (my name for the two books – not the authors) are deceptively simple. The covers suggest that these might be children’s books, and they are written in a bucolic style that masks the quiet complexity of these novels. Tony Earley seems to have effortlessly created a richly detailed world with fully developed and engaging characters.

In the first of the two books, Jim the Boy, we are introduced to Jim as an infant. His father has died unexpectedly in the fields of the family farm at a young age. Jim is raised by his mother and three bachelor uncles in the town of Aliceville in western North Carolina. If you think “Mayberry”, you’re going too cosmopolitan. Jim’s boyhood is a rural existence in the years between the first and second World Wars. As Jim begins to grow up, his world expands beyond the farm as he begins to learn about the world around him and his own family. It sounds so simple but is a surprisingly engaging read.

In the second book, The Blue Star, Jim is a senior in high school on the eve of World War II. World events are beginning to encroach on Aliceville, even as Jim struggles to come to grips with becoming the starting shortstop on his baseball team and the eternal mystery that is high school girls. The ability of Jim’s uncles to protect him from the realities of the adult world begin to wane, and Jim is faced with some tough and very adult choices. There will almost certainly be a third book in the “Jim series” to complete or extend Jim’s story. I’m looking forward to it.

While the two books can easily stand on their own, the reader will be rewarded for reading both books. The second book, The Blue Star, reveals the back story on several situations that were taken for granted in the first book. I read them both within a few weeks of each other, and I recommend that approach.

Earley’s style is warm and generous without being maudlin. Although set in the rural south, Earley avoids the gothic “things go wrong on the farm” narrative. Life isn’t always rosy, but the farm of Jim’s youth is the kind of place that actual Southerners might be able to relate to – even us city slickers.