Book Review: ‘Tree. Table. Book,’ by Lois Lowry, and ‘Not Nothing,’ by Gayle Forman

[Pelican Press 0]

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Book Review: ‘Tree. Table. Book,’ by Lois Lowry, and ‘Not Nothing,’ by Gayle Forman

“After a hundred years, you get a little tired of being the last one left in a conversation,” he notes, addressing his narrative to someone named Olka. “You get a little tired of everything, really.”

Then 12-year-old Alex barges into Josey’s life. “The boy,” as he calls him, has done something terrible, which Josey refers to only as “the Incident.” Alex’s social worker has sent him to volunteer at Shady Glen for the summer while he awaits his court hearing. It’s his last opportunity (a word Alex hates, having had it thrown in his face by too many authority figures) to avoid being shipped off to juvie. And he gets off to a rocky start: “The first thing the boy said when he entered Shady Glen Retirement Home was ‘This place smells like ******!’”

The other summer volunteer, Maya-*****, is a private school know-it-all with two attentive moms and a diva of a grandmother, another Shady Glen resident. It’s been nearly a year since Alex’s own mother, Alexandra, was taken from him by mental illness. He’s been dumped with his aunt and uncle, who barely speak to him: “The boy wasn’t even worth words.” But Josey, the silent centenarian, sees something in him.

When Alex comes to Josey’s room to deliver a meal and accidentally knocks a portrait off the wall, Josey cries out, “Olka!” — which he later explains is “short for Oleksandra, … or Alexandra, here.” Intrigued by the shared name, Alex asks what she was like.

From this point on, a second narrative stream, in which Josey opens up to Alex about his past, alternates with the first. He tells the boy about his life in prewar Poland as the son of a prosperous ******* family; about how he and Olka, an unlikely pair, found love when she came to work as a seamstress in the Kravitz department store; and how she taught him to sew, a skill that saved his life after the Nazis invaded. In the process, he helps the boy understand how people can learn to “rise to the occasion of their lives” — Olka’s guiding principle.

Forman, the author of young ****** novels that include “If I Stay” and the Just One Day series, handles the unusual split narration deftly, and lets tension build in both story lines. How did Josey survive the Holocaust, and what happened to Olka? How bad was “the Incident,” and what will it cost the boy? Past trouble can’t be undone, but talking about it with a friend makes it a little easier to bear.

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#Book #Review #Tree #Table #Book #Lois #Lowry #Gayle #Forman

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