The Liberation of Gabriel King **

By K.L. Going.
Copyright 2005 by  K.L. Going.
Published by Scholastic Inc. New York.
1st Edition by Scholastic 2008.

Young people books are rarely on the same level of sophistication of an adult book, so it's rare the juvenile book that can compete with the adult book for quality and transcend it's kin. So don't let the 2 star rating steer you away from the book.  It's really quite good.  Remember that 2 stars (if you look at my opening posting for this blog, it has the definitions of the ratings there) means pretty good on an adult standard.

It brings up a couple of interesting topics such as bullying, racism, friendship and loyalty. These topics are presented in a pretty obvious manner but the presentation is good enough. 

The story is about two friends who live in the deep south (Georgia?) in the summer of 1976.  So it's (recent) historical fiction.  The two friends are Frita Wilson, the daughter of an African American preacher and Gabriel King, the son of a working poor white family.  Frita is brave and athletic.  Gabriel is small and afraid of everything.  He gets bullied a lot.  Frita tries to protect him. 

It's summer before they enter fifth grade and Gabe does not want to advance because he is afraid of the two main bullies, Duke Evans and Frankie Carmen.  After one especially cruel incidence of bullying, Frita goes to Duke Evans and punches him in the nose and a fight ensues.  After breaking it up, the father of Duke scolds his son... for getting beat by a N..... girl.

Gabriel was still afraid of near everything.  I found this part a little hard too believe - he was afraid of EVERYTHING!  Frita came up with a plan.  Gabe would make a list of everything he was afraid of and through out the summer, and before they entered the fifth grade, they would scratch off as many items on the list by trying to do each thing on the list so they would not be afraid anymore. 

There was one humorous scene in which Frita asked if he was done with his list, but Gabe wasn't because he kept adding things to his list.  There was another scene that struck me as very true.  One of the fears that Gabe had was swinging off the rope in the local swimming hole.  Frita made him do it.  After that, he loved swinging off that rope.  It reminded me of my daughters when they are afraid of something,  One time on a water slide, Georgia my younger daughter, was afraid.  But after she went once, I couldn't stop her from going for the rest of the day.

Eventually Frita came up with her own list, which was much shorter than Gabe's.  One of her fears was of the bully Duke's father.  In an effort to face her fear, she approached him to apologize for the fight.  The author doesn't tell the reader what the father says, but she leaves the group of men very rattled.

There are some nice things in this book.  Not too many books are set in the 70's very often, especially kids books.  The 70's was an interesting era and I think that the author shows the feeling of the decade by describing the thoughts of one of the characters ( i forget which) when that character says or thinks about the racist remark that "this type of thing is very surprising to occur in this day and age."  But is it really?  I mean we are talking about less than a decade from the major period of civil rights.  I would guess that it occurred all the time.  Heck, racism even occurs today more than 30 years later, albeit less frequently and in much subtler ways..