The silent boy

Lois Lowry

Book - 2003

Katy, the precocious ten-year-old daughter of the town doctor, befriends a retarded boy.

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Subjects
Published
Boston : Houghton Mifflin 2003.
Language
English
Main Author
Lois Lowry (-)
Physical Description
178 p. : ill
ISBN
9780618282319
  • Prologue: June 1987
  • 1.. September 1908
  • 2.. September 1910
  • 3.. October 1910
  • 4.. November 1910
  • 5.. December 1910
  • 6.. January 1911
  • 7.. February 1911
  • 8.. March 1911
  • 9.. April 1911
  • 10.. April 1911
  • 11.. May 1911
  • 12.. July 1911
  • 13.. August 1911
  • 14.. September 1911
  • 15.. October 1911
  • 16.. October 1911
  • 17.. Paul, After
  • 18.. Nell, After
  • 19.. Peggy, After
  • 20.. Schuyler's Mill, After
Review by Booklist Review

Gr. 6^-10. Antique photographs, printed at the head of each chapter, form the framework of this nostalgic family story set in the early twentieth century. Precocious eight-year-old Katy Thatcher already knows that she wants to be a doctor like her father. She lives in a large, comfortable house in a New England town with her loving, smart parents and Peggy Stoltz, a farm girl who helps with housework. Katy loves Peggy, and she's intrigued by Jacob, Peggy's brother, a gentle, silent 13-year-old with a fondness for animals, who is "touched in the head." During a happy year, Katy plays with her friends, accompanies her father on house calls, welcomes a new baby sister, and visits Peggy's family farm, where she learns some of the harsher realities of country life--including the fact that kittens are drowned to control their numbers. She also develops a fragile companionship with Jacob, who she often finds visiting her family's horses. It's in the Thatcher barn that Katy stumbles across a secret that, when later revealed, shakes several families and ends tragically; a baby dies and Jacob is at fault. The photographs of characters and scenes add an interesting, if sometimes contrived, touch, and Lowry's graceful, lively prose is dense with historical details that, although atmospheric, sometimes focus more on Katy's lifestyle than her story. Katy's first-person voice also occasionally seems too mature. But Lowry still manages to create an appealing character in the curious, unusually compassionate girl, layering her story with questions about how families shape lives and the misunderstandings that can lead to heartbreak. --Gillian Engberg

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Set in the early 1900s, Lowry's (Number the Stars) lyrical novel unspools at a leisurely pace through the eyes of Katy, who wishes to follow in the footsteps of her doctor father. As the narrator chronicles the pivotal year she turns nine, she describes the unlikely friendship she develops with a "touched" farm boy. The author creates a compelling contrast in social dynamics through two sisters-Peg, hired by Katy's family, and Nell, hired by Katy's next-door neighbors. She outlines the disparities not only in the families' financial situations but also in the options available when Nell becomes involved with the son of her employers. When Katy befriends the girls' brother, Jacob, whom townspeople dismiss as an "imbecile," Katy discovers his sensitivity and skill with animals ("It was odd how Jacob never looked at me-his eyes were always to the side, or his face turned away, and he couldn't, or didn't, ever speak-but he communicated in his own ways"), a perception that makes her uniquely positioned to witness the book's terrible climax and to bring some compassion to the events. Historical events (the introduction of the automobile, the dangers of industrialization) unfold with immediacy, as revelations. Katy's awareness of a devastating fire at the mill, for instance, allows her to connect with the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York. Period photographs (selected by the author) lead and gracefully connect each chapter. The author balances humor and generosity with the obstacles and injustice of Katy's world to depict a complete picture of the turn of the 20th century. Ages 10-up. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 5-8-Katy is a doctor's daughter in the early 20th century, and her curiosity is tolerated, even encouraged. This explains her relationship with the 14-year-old brother of her family's hired girl, Peggy. Jacob is "the silent boy" of the book's title who somehow communicates with animals, but only makes humming and clicking sounds when he is with people. Nevertheless, Katy and Jacob develop an unusual and treasured friendship. As befits a child growing up at this time, Katy is a true innocent and is puzzled by some of the things that happen around her, such as the seemingly sudden appearance of a new baby in her family. The most dramatic incident occurs almost at the end of the book on the night of Katy's 10th birthday, when Jacob disappears along with his sister Nellie's unwanted and unnamed baby. Although Katy intuits that Jacob has brought the child to her own baby sister's nursery to ensure its proper care, Jacob is nevertheless arrested when the infant is found dead. The courts place him in the town's asylum for the rest of his life. The now-retired Docky (the nickname that Katy's young patients gave her) narrates the story as she looks back from 1987 to these main events. Lowry excels in developing strong and unique characters and in showing Katy's life in a small town that changes around her as the first telephones and automobiles arrive. Family photographs, along with some that the author found in a New Hampshire antique store or borrowed from friends, enliven and encourage a deeper response to this very special historical novel.-Ellen Fader, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review

(Middle School, High School) Looking back from a distance of many decades, an elderly doctor recalls her small-town childhood and the unusual boy she befriended. Katy Thatcher is nearly eight when she first catches a glimpse of Jacob Stoltz. Described as ""touched,"" Jacob seems to be autistic (though Lowry doesn't specify): he never speaks, yet mimics noises that he hears; he averts his eyes from other people, yet has a natural affinity for animals. Illustrated with vintage photographs representing the various characters and their era (1910-1911), the well-paced story is narrated by privileged yet compassionate Katy, who describes accompanying her doctor-father on his calls, the arrival of a new baby sister, and her fleeting and tentative, yet tender, interactions with Jacob. Assured, quietly affecting prose traces Katy's growth from a little girl who believes new babies are found in the garden to her semi-awareness of an illicit neighborhood romance that inexorably leads to a tragedy that even Katy's intuitive understanding is unable to prevent. At the beginning of the book, the narrator worries that her reminiscence ""is not really a story for children, though it is about a child,"" and the book does raise questions of audience. Peers of Katy will not have the maturity to understand the novel's subject matter or subtleties; older readers may resist reading a story about an eight-year-old girl. But special readers will find it emotionally devastating and infinitely haunting. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Around her private trove of atmospheric old photographs, Newbery winner Lowry (The Giver, 1993; Number the Stars, 1990) spins a patchy but sensitive tale of a country doctor's daughter observing the lives of those around her--in particular the women, and a mentally disabled teenager with a strong affinity for animals. Writing as an older adult, Katy looks back to 1911, the year she first became aware of the new hired girl's brother Jacob. "Touched by God," according to his mother, dubbed "imbecile" by ruder locals, Jacob never speaks, does not go to school, and never makes eye contact. But he ably helps to care for the livestock on his family's farm, whether it be with routine milking, or the delicate task of persuading a ewe to accept a lamb rejected by its own mother. Taking her cue from the steady, tolerant adults around her, Katy treats him with respect, learning to be comfortable around him in their occasional meetings, and even to understand him a little. Jacob passes in and out of view as other events, from the arrival of a new baby in her household, to the planning of her ninth birthday party, not only absorb more of Katy's attention, but give her narrative an episodic structure; several of the characters, in fact, seem constructed more to flesh out the photos at their heads than to advance the story. Jacob's story ends in a tragedy deftly foreshadowed. Katy wraps up the loose ends by describing what became of the other major characters. Though well-crafted and narrated by a perceptive, large-hearted child who goes on to follow in her father's profession, this lacks the focus of Lowry's best work. (Fiction. 11-13) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Prologue: June 1987 I am a very old woman now. My great-grandchildren--who call me Docky, a name my youngest patients gave me years ago--ask me to tell them stories, and I make up tales about talking pigs with pink hair ribbons on their curly tails, or monkeys who wear vests and carry canes. I am as good at foolishness as I once was in the operating room.      If I tried to tell them this story, the one I am about to set down here, their parents would send me warning looks over the heads of the children. Don't , the looks would say. Stop.      Meaning, too depressing. Too complicated. Too long ago.      So when they come to me--young Austin, named for his great-grandfather; the twins, Sam and Zoe; merry-eyed Lily, adopted from China; and solemn Katharine, who has my name but insists on it whole, never Katy, as I once was, or Kate, as I am now--when they come and ask me to tell them stories, I never tell them this one.      It is not really a story for children, though it is about a child.      But someday one of them will point from a car window toward a huge stone building with boarded windows set in an empty, unlandscaped field at the west side of town and ask, "What's that?" Perhaps they will see, through untrimmed ivy on the stone wall surrounding the field, the carved word in the post to which an iron gate, long gone, was once attached. ASYLUM. A strange word, and a great-grandchild will likely mispronounce it at first, as I remember I did when I was learning to read.      "What's that? What was it for?"      I will write it down here, and this is what they will read, as an answer. But where to begin?      I will begin with myself. Katy Thatcher. Here I am, thirteen, wearing a sailor dress in this old photograph, looking solemn (but proud, too; the dress was a new one, and I felt grown up). I was , I think, a solemn girl: Henry and Caroline Thatcher's oldest child, and for eight years their only.      Our house on Orchard Street was large, and to the side of the big shingled house, its entrance approached from a pebbled walk through the yard (the walk was between oak trees, and Levi, the stable boy who tended the horses and did odd jobs, spent many days in fall raking it bare), was my father's office. A small sign at the side gate read HENRY THATCHER, M.D. From my bedroom window above the porch roof, I could see patients unlatch the gate and make their way to that door, bringing their babies, their arthritis, their small aches and larger sufferings, to my father.      By thirteen I already knew that I wanted to be a doctor, too. I read accounts in the news of the war that was raging in Europe, and I could not wrap my mind around the reasons for it or the terrible logistics of battles far away. I listened to my parents talking to their friends, our next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop, as they fretted over their oldest boy, Paul, who was just finishing Princeton then and should have been looking ahead to law school and to joining his father's firm one day. But Paul was already yearning to enlist in a war that had not yet, in 1915, begun to take American boys.      But at thirteen, when I read the war news, I thought only of the wounded and how if I were a doctor I could set their bones and heal their burns. I had watched my father do so many times.      I was not yet four when San Francisco toppled in an earthquake and burned. Even so young, I heard talk of it.      At eight, I had heard of the terrible fire in New York, of the factory girls, scores of them, leaping from the windows, their clothes aflame, and dying, burned and mangled, on the sidewalk while people watched in horror. My mother had said "Shhh" to Father when she saw me listening, but he, seeing that my interest was real and not just a child's curiosity, spoke to me of it later. Though I was still a child, we talked of the ways in which death comes, and how perhaps, not always, but sometimes, a doctor could push death away, could hold it back, or at the very least make it come easily.      By thirteen, by the time I had the sailor dress of which I was so proud, many of those moments were past. San Francisco had been rebuilt. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire had brought about new laws to protect factory workers.      And on the edge of town, when I was thirteen, stood the stone building called the Asylum. It still stands there today, though newspaper editorials call it the Eyesore in an attempt at wit, and there is talk of tearing it down to make room for a housing development. Its windows are boarded over now, and the grounds are littered with debris. Sometimes, in my growing-up years, when Austin was my beau, we would walk out that way, holding hands. Sometimes I found myself glancing at the ground, wondering if I would spot the gleam and flicker of a cat's-eye marble dropped by a boy. I wondered, then, as I still do, about the boy who had once given me a kitten and changed my life forever. His name was Jacob Stoltz.      His is the story I mean to write down now. 1. September 1908 My friend Austin Bishop lived next door and was to be invited to my sixth birthday party the next month. Austin was already six and said that he could read. I thought it was true because he showed me a book with a story in it and told me the story--it was about a mouse--and then he told me the story again, and the words were exactly the same. Reading, I knew, was what made the words always, always be the same.      Jessie Wood was to come to my party, too, and had told me a secret, that she was bringing me a tea set with pink flowers as a birthday present. She had promised her mother that she would not tell. A promise was a very important, very grown-up thing, and if I promised not to tell something, I would never ever tell. But Jessie was often naughty. She disobeyed. She told me that the pink flowers were roses and the tea set was real china.      Austin's brother, Paul, was not invited because he was too big. Paul was almost fifteen years old and had his own desk, many pencils, and a book with maps. He had a pocketknife that was very sharp and we were not to touch it, ever. He tried to smoke his father's pipe but he was too young, and it made him sick. We saw him being sick out by the barn. It was yellow and splattered on his shoes.      Austin's father was named Mr. Bishop, and he was a lawyer, but at home he spent a lot of time out in the barn, pounding and sawing. He liked tools and steam engines and wheels and anything that moved its parts and made noise. Sometimes he said he wished he could be a train engineer. During the summer, when Austin's birthday was coming, Mr. Bishop and Paul worked many days out in the barn. It was a secret. No one could peek. They made a lot of noise, and it was a surprise for Austin's birthday.      My mother said, when she saw what they had made, that it was a mazing. I had never seen a mazing before. It had wheels, but it was not a velocipede. Everyone had a velocipede, even me. I was allowed to ride mine to the mailbox, but then I was always to turn around and come back.      Austin could sit in his mazing. He pushed with his feet on the pedals and he traveled down the walk. I supposed he could go to town in the mazing if he wished. Perhaps he could go to his father's office. Or to the library, or Whittaker's Dry Goods! A mazing could go anywhere.      I hoped that someone was building me a mazing for my birthday, but I didn't think that anyone was because there was no noise coming from the Bishops' barn or from our stable, except the plain old noise of the horses snorting and stamping their feet as Levi cleaned their stalls.      Our horses were named Jed and Dahlia, and they were brown but their manes and tails were black. Our cook was named Naomi, and she was also brown. Everything has a color, I remember thinking. I could not think of a single thing that had no color, except the water in my bath. You could see through water, I realized--could see your own hand when you tried to hold water in it, but then it ran away, right through your fingers, no matter how hard you tried to keep it there.      Austin had one more thing besides the mazing, one more thing that I wished I had. He had a baby sister! She had horrid black hair and cried a lot and her name was Laura Paisley Bishop.      How they got Laura Paisley was very, very interesting to me. Austin's Nana took him on the train to Philadelphia for a whole day. How I wished my grandmother would do that for me! My own Gram lived in Cincinnati and came by train in the summers to visit, but she never took me with her on the train. Austin said it was noisy and clattery and you could look through the windows and see trees go by as fast as anything. Sometimes, when the train was going around a curve, you could look ahead and see the engine and know that you were part of it, still attached. It was hard to imagine.      They rode to Philadelphia and went to a museum, where they saw stuffed creatures, like bears, posing as if they were alive, and then they had lunch in a restaurant, with strawberry ice cream for dessert. Then they went back to the train station and came all the way home on the train again. When they arrived at our town, Austin's Nana used the telephone at the railroad station to call his home and see if anything exciting had happened while they were away.      "My goodness!" she said to Austin, then. "There will be quite a surprise at your house when we get there."      So they walked all the way home from the station, and when they got to Austin's house, he saw the surprise. It was a baby sister!      They had found her out in the garden. That's what they told Austin: that his mother had gone outside to pick some tomatoes for lunch, and when she looked down, she saw a lovely baby girl there.      "Fibber!" I said to Austin.      I did not believe him because I had been playing in my own backyard almost all day, and never once heard a baby, and did not see Mrs. Bishop go out with her tomato basket at all. In fact, my mother had told me to play quietly because Mrs. Bishop had a headache and was lying down most of the day.      So I called Austin a fibber and he was angry and threw some dirt at me and said I could never hold his baby. But I asked my mother later and she said it was true that Mrs. Bishop had found the baby in the garden. Mother said that she hoped someday we would find one in ours.      So I decided I would look carefully each day. But it seemed a very strange thing, that babies appeared in gardens, because it might be raining. Or it might even be winter! I hoped that the babies were bundled up in thick blankets then!      I had to apologize to Austin for calling him a fibber. His big brother, Paul, was there when I did, and Paul laughed and said I shouldn't bother. Paul said I was the smartest child on the street. (It was not true, because I couldn't read yet, no matter how I tried.) But his mother, who was sitting in a rocking chair holding Laura Paisley, said, "Shhhhh," so Paul shushed and went away and slammed the screen door behind him, which startled the baby, so that her eyes opened wide for a second and then closed again.      I hoped her hair would improve because it really was horrid to look at. It was exactly like Jed and Dahlia's manes. Excerpted from The Silent Boy by Lowry Lois All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.