THE BEET FIELDS

Using his lyrical voice, Paulsen (Alida’s Song, 1999, etc.) presents a true-to-life, thinly veiled biographical portrait of a boy’s 16th year. This boy (all that Paulsen names him) runs away from his alcoholic mother when she makes sexual advances toward him and he finds a job thinning beets for North Dakota farmers. He befriends the Mexicans with whom he works, and learns how they make their hard lives bearable with friendship and the simple pleasures of food and music. When offered a steady summer job by one farmer, he takes it because he’s attracted to the farmer’s daughter. He never spends his money and accumulates hundreds of dollars, all of which a sheriff’s deputy takes. Hitchhiking to escape from the deputy, he eventually signs on with a traveling carnival and learns how to fleece the rubes. The book ends with an account of his first sexual experience. Paulsen’s simple prose gives the story a dream-like quality that smoothes the edges of its harsher events. It’s the truth of memory rather than unrelenting realism, although the truth of the events comes through. The sexual content may make the book inappropriate for less mature readers, but it’s essentially an optimistic, coming-of-age story and a new take on the life of this popular author. (Fiction. 12-15)