Trouble by Gary D. Schmidt

Henry Smith’s family has been living in the picturesque town of Blythbury-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts since 1678. His father has always told him: “If you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” It is a motto that seems to have served the Smith family well, until the night a pickup truck runs down Henry’s older brother, Franklin, and puts him into a coma.

The driver of the pickup truck—a schoolmate of Franklin’s—is a young Cambodian refugee, and the tragedy quickly ignites racial tensions that have been slowly brewing beneath the pretty veneer of Blythbury-by-the-Sea. Amidst the fury of the town, the volatile relations between Blythbury-by-the-Sea and nearby Merton (known as Little Cambodia), as well as his family’s private grief, Henry sets out to find answers at the only place he thinks can yield him something—anything: Mt. Katahdin. The mountain he and Franklin had planned to climb before the accident.

With his best friend and his newly adopted dog, Black Dog, Henry sets off for Katahdin and runs immediately into the only person willing to give hitchhikers with a dog a ride: Chay Chouan, the driver in the pickup truck that fateful night. As they make their way to Katahdin together, Henry begins to realize that perhaps his father was wrong, that perhaps the more you run from Trouble, the closer Trouble exists, that perhaps his brother might not have been the perfect American Hero that Henry had thought him to be.

Gary D. Schmidt has written a lyrical novel dealing with grief, family, and the unpleasant truths that might lie within the people we love and admire. In Trouble, readers see how racism still runs rampant in the hearts of men and women. While I commend Gary D. Schmidt for tackling this subject, I could not find myself completely enjoying the book. It was slow in places and oddly paced. I found Henry’s (and his best friend’s) characters believable, but for the rest of the cast (including Henry’s family and Chay Chouan) I was disappointed. The secondary characters felt as if they had stepped straight out of a character template and into the novel. That said, Gary D. Schmidt is an accomplished writer with a beautiful sense of language.

I would recommend this book to patient readers and readers interested in books with rich description. Readers who are looking for multicultural perspectives will also be interested in this book. As much as I would like to recommend Trouble heartily, I can only give a lukewarm nod of approval for Trouble.

Schmidt, Gary D.. Trouble. 1 ed. New York: Clarion Books, 2008. Print.