RECYCLING GEORGE

In this slender but expressively written story that is full of agile observations yet strangely lacking in emotional reality, a poor boy moves in with a rich classmate and his family, enjoys the good life, then realizes that staying on involves a sacrifice he isn’t willing to make. George Honiker, who is in sixth grade, lives in a tiny cramped space in a trailer park with his very pregnant sister and her husband Karl. Karl works in the local mill, which is both the backbone of the town’s economy and its biggest polluter, “transforming a thousand gallons of clean water into poison every sixty seconds.” When environmental activists force the mill to close, Karl and George’s sister are gone by the end of day—Karl has found a new job that starts immediately—leaving George some money and instructions to follow. Instead, George accepts an invitation to move in with Rennie Whitfield, the richest boy in town. George loves living in luxury, and soon Rennie’s idiosyncratic grandmother offers to adopt him, hoping to recycle him from his poor trash background into a gentleman. George, realizing the deal requires him to give up his family and identity, declines her invitation before moving back with his sister. The elegance of the writing can’t hide the fact that the Whitfield clan operates on a psychological plane that’s devoid of human authenticity, and George’s deep attachment to his family is not adequately rendered. So his final decision doesn’t have the emotional gravitas and air of inevitability this graceful book deserves. (Fiction. 8-12)