Review of the Day: Shooting the Moon

Shooting the Moon
By Frances O’Roark Dowell
Atheneum (Simon & Schuster)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-1-4169-5191-9
Ages 8-12
On shelves now

I’ve written about this before, but there’s a flush of appreciation a reviewer experiences when they discover a great author that they’ve never read before. Even if that person has been around for years. In the case of Frances O’Roark Dowell, I’d read her first Phineas L. MacGuire book and I thought it was great. Still, I’d never gotten around to reading some of her better known works for older readers. I’d never picked up Dovey Coe or Chicken Boy or even The Secret Language of Boysage of Girls. It just never came up. Still, I figure a person’s got to start somewhere and so the book I decided to begin with her newest title, the historically minded Shooting the Moon. A lot of people love Ms. Dowell and maybe they’ve become unable to tell one great book of hers from another. To those people I say this: This book is amazing. Top notch, wonderful, humorous, meaningful, with a pull and a hit in the gut that’ll knock a readers’ socks off. What we’ve got here is a title that has an excellent chance of engaging every reader that comes across it. And timely doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Jamie Dexter is a card shark, an army brat, and her father’s daughter. She and her older brother TJ were raised to love the United States Army by their father, the Colonel, and as far as they’re concerned the greatest thing in the entire world is getting a chance to fight and die for your country. Seems like the Colonel would be pleased as punch to have TJ enlist and go to Vietnam to fight instead of going to college, but oddly enough that doesn’t seem to be the case. Still, off TJ goes and before he leaves Jamie asks him to write her letters about everything he sees and feels over there. Except that TJ doesn’t do that. Instead he sends her rolls of black and white film he’s taken over there with very precise instructions: "Jamie: No facilities here … Please develop and send contact sheets." Of course, that means that Jamie has to learn how to develop film, and she does when she gets a chance. And through TJ’s lens, Jamie sees more than just what it’s like in Vietnam. She now hears the experiences of the soldiers that walk through the rec center where she works. She sees her father as a man and not a larger than life figure. And she begins to understand that sometimes things aren’t as simple as you would like them to be.

Reading my description of the book I know that you might be a little worried. It sounds like a book inclined to get preachy, doesn’t it? I’m as anti-war as the best of them, but there’s nothing worse than a work of fiction for kids that gets all holier-than-thou, proselytizing its views on war and how it’s naughty. But Frances O’Roark Dowell isn’t going to play that game. For one thing, she really is an army brat. For another, she’s a good writer. This isn’t a book that tells you what to believe. It’s a book that starts with someone who thinks that they know what to think only to find that the world is a complicated place. It was a complicated place in the late 60s and it’s a complicated place today. Which is not to say that you can’t take a moral or a lesson out of this book if you want to. It’s only giving you an option.

There is a school of thought that says that if you place a story in history, you better have a darn good reason for doing so. So the question becomes, could Dowell have set this story in the here and now rather than the past? Would it have served the moral better? The answer is no, there is no other time period that would have better served this story. For one thing, you could have a character taking pictures with black and white film, but digital cameras are undoubtedly more probable today. And you could have sent TJ to Iraq instead of Vietnam, but part of the reason the end of this book works as well as it does is because we can look at the past and learn from it.

The thing is, this is a book that’s easy to love. You love the people in it. I, for one, loved the character of Jamie. She felt true and real and interesting. She also carries her certainties with her on her sleeve. "I was six months away from turning thirteen and I thought I knew everything." Can’t say it any plainer than that (not to mention that it carries a whiff of To Kill a Mockingbird). Really, every character in this book (and there aren’t that many) appears with all three dimensions firmly intact. For example, Jamie describes Cindy Lorenzo, a girl who is somewhat learning disabled, as being "nervous and excitable and shaky around the edges. She hit and bit." Pitch perfect, that.

As for the writing itself, Dowell’s book is only 176 pages and she packs each one with interesting text. Chapter Two, for example, begins, "We were stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, a flat piece of real estate that threatened to burst into flames every afternoon from June through September." Or the first sentences of Chapter Four, "TJ’s first letter to me wasn’t a letter at all. It was a roll of film." You can see that Dowell includes equal parts interest and good writing, and the effect is tight. This is a book that doesn’t mince words. It gets right to the point every time and doesn’t sacrifice anything in the process. Rare? You don’t know the half of it. The writing and the editing on this puppy must have been intense.

It’s hard to find fault here. I do know at least one person who thought it a little odd that the book didn’t concentrate more on the moon landing and how that would have affected the characters. The book is called Shooting the Moon after all. But Dowell covers her bases, having TJ speculate at times about "the idea that there are human footprints on the moon’s surface." Classrooms of children will someday be asked what the moon signifies to TJ and to Jamie. I can already see it. My questions and concerns about the book were a little more basic. I would have liked a little more background on the Colonel’s past. Did he serve in WWII or Korea? Does he know what real combat is like? Does this inform what he feels about his own son enlisting? And maybe an explanation of where Jamie is getting all this photographic paper and chemicals for developing her brother’s pictures would have been nice. I assume that the army provided all this free of charge in their rec center but we don’t know it for a fact.