Ten

hink 1993. Rabbit (in the tub, waiting) and her older sister PK (on the toilet lid, toes curled up in readiness) contemplate the room’s built-in laundry hamper. Earlier, on her own, Rabbit has searched the hamper for the bath-time stories PK always finds in it.

“Did you smell anything?” [PK asked.]
“Yes,” said Rabbit. “I did.”
“It was stories you smelled. They rub off people’s skin. Those stories rub off onto sheets and shirts and jeans. So stories smell like people. And that’s the proof that they are in the hamper.”

PK, the center sister of Susan Patron’s first middle-grade novel, Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe, shares an interest in stories with Lucky Trimble, heroine of The Higher Power of Lucky. PK makes them up, Lucky lives them.

Published thirteen years later, Lucky’s own story began flickering on the horizon several months after PK appeared. It had cropped up in conversation, or even early chapter form, only to slip away like a desert mirage, until a dinner in 2004 at the San Diego midwinter ALA conference. Ginny Walter, Amy Kellman, and I heard that Lucky lately had been up to some eavesdropping. We loved her thenceforth.

The tales she heard — about real, imperfect adults, and one dog — certainly sound like the truth. They are told in first person. Lucky’s story is told in what I think of as “intimate third.” Try it yourself; it’s a tricky point of view to pull off, but it is crucial to The Higher Power of Lucky.

Editors know their books well — and long for acknowledgment of each book’s higher qualities. The highest in this case is Susan’s purity of voice on behalf of a specific ten-year-old. Look on page 2 of the book, at how the girl’s perceptions of the world dramatize (without a whisper of telling from “an author”) her need for parents and love and some reassurance that the vicissitudes of life can be survived.

Look at pages 14–15 for how Lucky appreciates her father. I cannot see any literary convenience to his absence, but rather see the hard fact of it for his daughter — who is, after all, only trying to understand why her dad has abandoned her. Hence Lucky’s presentation of him as mostly mysterious, even mythic. The mother’s death has in it an element of scold. Psychologically apt, and funny, too. The writer does not instruct us about how to feel toward these parents, their natures or fates, but leaves it to Lucky to puzzle them out.

Take Brigitte. It’s Lucky’s discovery of a passport and misreading of phone calls from France that lead the girl to panic. An adult voice, narrating from aloft, could have straightened that out in a sentence, but then Lucky would not have run away, stumbled across Miles, been found by Lincoln, or discovered, at last, the perfect resolution for that urn of ashes. Lucky, then, is responsible for her own plot. To the newspaper that sniped at the happy ending with a parenthetical “(naturally)” — intending to skewer a whole string of Newbery Medal winners, I suppose — I’ll snipe back on Lucky’s behalf: “Is that too much to ask for a kid you love?” Brigitte loves Lucky, yes, like the daughter she never had, and isn’t it fine? When Lucky’s illustrator Matt Phelan was reading the manuscript — at Susan’s request, for she’d seen his jacket art for Betty G. Birney’s The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs and knew as a librarian the value of illustrations in books for middle readers — he came to Brigitte’s fiercely loving “You know if anyone ever hurt you I would rip their heart out” and called me excitedly with “Yes!”

I want to say a word about Miles, the betrayed, from whose sorrow Lucky learns so much about herself, and about Lincoln, that desert Galahad. When Lincoln comes around the side of the hill on page 125, I always weep with relief for Lucky and cheer with pride for young American manhood. The people of Hard Pan, California, are fortunate to have Susan Patron’s deft touch on their shoulders. Like E. M. Forster in his essay, “What I Believe,” I am with the old Scotsman who wanted “less chastity and more delicacy.” An editorial mantra, I guess, as well as a hallmark for the writing here, which I am happy to hold up in awe. I know of only one other book, Paula Fox’s How Many Miles to Babylon?, that portrays so surely a ten-year-old’s sensibility. It’s the surety of the point of view that appeals to me foremost in The Higher Power of Lucky — but then it’s also the book’s humor, its ultimate optimism, its truthfulness. All these are qualities of the woman who wrote it without intruding herself upon a single word.

Finally, a mention of dogs. HMS Beagle’s original name, well into page-proof stage, was RachelCarson. I agreed to changing it with some misgivings, because I feared errors would creep into the text and not be caught, despite the best of human efforts. Instead, a deeper connection emerged between Lucky and the concept of adaptation, Darwin, and her own “highly evolved” being. The now notorious Roy the Dog — bless him — was so named from the beginning.

There is another book on the schedule about Lucky, her pals, and a newcomer to Hard Pan, a girl from Hollywood who is just Lucky’s age. Susan and Atheneum’s exceptional Ginee Seo will be contemplating that story together.

May the hamper overflow.

Even in retirement, editor Richard Jackson has more than twenty books in the chute, scheduled into 2010.