Entertaining, "fish out of water," YA novel
I checked out from Hoopla the audiobook version of this novel, which was produced by Recorded Books Repertory Company. There are eight viewpoint characters, and each chapter in their POV is narrated by a separate actor. This is a list of those eight characters:
Capricorn (Cap) Anderson
Flora Donnelly
Sophie Donnelly
Zach Powers
Naomi Erlanger
Hugh Winkleman
Darryl Pennyfield
Principal Kasigi
Cap is 13 years old. He was born in 1994, and this story is set in 2007, which is contemporaneous to the year this book was published. Cap lives on a farm called Garland. It used to be a hippie commune, which was founded by his grandmother in 1967. Up through the 1970s, there were multiple families with children living there, but by the end of that decade, most of them had moved away. Currently, Cap and his 67-year-old grandmother, Rain, are the only remaining residents of the former commune. Cap's parents joined the Peace Corps and died of malaria on their mission when he was very small. He has been raised ever since by Rain, who has homeschooled Cap. They have no TV, internet or phone, and their only entertainment is vinyl records with music from the 1960s, especially the Beatles. Rain taught Cap to drive a pickup truck when he was only eight and has also taught him to meditate, do tai chi, and play the guitar, as well as cook and clean and efficiently carry out all of the many laborious jobs required to keep a family farm going. As the story opens, Rain falls out of a tree while harvesting plums and breaks her hip. Since they have no phone, and he cannot call 911, Cap has no choice but to drive her to the hospital himself. She has to have surgery and faces eight weeks of in-residence physical rehabilitation. (Since this book is geared towards children, there is no mention of how a woman with no visible means of support, who has long rejected ordinary society, comes up with the money to pay for both hospital and rehab services, such as collecting Social Security and signing up for Medicare.)
Since Cap cannot go back to Garland and stay on his own, he is assigned to a social worker named Flora. By an amazing coincidence, Flora and her parents lived at Garland when she was a child. She was five when her family joined the commune in 1972, at the height of the hippie movement and student protests against the war in Vietnam. She lived with her parents at Garland for six years until she was 11, and she had an extremely difficult adjustment to ordinary society when they moved away from Garland. Because she can strongly relate to Cap's unique "fish out of water" situation, she decides to take him home with her rather than assigning him to some other foster family. She is a divorced mom with a 16-year-old daughter, Sophie, who treats Cap terribly, perpetually sneering at him and calling him names. In spite of her psychological training, Flora never enforces any disciplinary consequences for Sophie's bullying of Cap.
Cap begins attending a large middle school, for grades 6-8, which has 1100 students. Because his grandmother has been homeschooling Cap in a manner that satisfies the curriculum of the county in which they live, and Cap is very bright, he is assigned to the eighth grade, which is appropriate for his age. He is extremely strange looking compared to the other kids. He has never had a haircut in his life, and his hair hangs down past his waist. He wears tie-dyed t-shirts, cotton drawstring pants, and homemade sandals made from corn husks.
We are introduced to several popular eighth grade students who, like Sophie, are arrogant bullies, in particular, Zach and Naomi, and an unfortunate eighth grader named Hugh, whom Zach has bullied since kindergarten. It is clear that there are no policies in place in the school to protect students from bullying. And, in fact, consequence-free bullying is a major theme of this entire novel.
Hugh befriends Cap but doesn't warn him that, when he is nominated by the popular kids and elected president of the eighth-grade class, this is not an honor. For some years now, there has been a vicious tradition at this school that the popular kids select a hapless student, whom they have already been torturing for years, to become the president. Then they spend the entire school year heckling and humiliating that president, and the last few such individuals have had emotional breakdowns. Principal Kasigi has been well aware of this atrocity the entire time it has been going on, and he has never done anything to stop it. Hugh feels both guilty and vastly relieved that Cap has been pushed into the hot seat this year because, if not for that fortuitous intervention, the designated stooge in that position would have been himself.
This novel has been advertised as a comedy but, both as it is written on the page and performed by the narrators, it did not come off as at all humorous to me personally.
Virtually every YA novel published within the past 35 years, which is primarily set at a public school, makes it blatantly clear that the John Hughes teen movies of the 1980s have made an indelible imprint on the zeitgeist of this country. It is almost impossible to find a YA novel, especially one billed as a comedy such as this one, and which has been written after the 1980s, that does not heavily borrow from Hughes' tropes, most significantly, rampant bullying at public schools with no preventive intervention whatsoever from adult authorities.
In many ways, Cap is an almost christ-like figure in this story. He presents a saintly example of innocence, integrity, compassion, and generosity to the student populace that gradually turns the entire school away from xenophobically taunting him to outright worshiping him. His only flaw is his complete ignorance of important social rules, which Rain never taught him, such as how to handle money and the importance of not driving without a license. It is his angelic naivete that seamlessly rolls the entire story forward and triggers important ethical growth arcs in all of the viewpoint teenage characters in this story.
Because of Cap's age and the fairy-tale type progression of the plot of this G-rated novel, it will probably be most appreciated by preteens aged 10 to 12.