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Buy Calling Out Your Name |
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Synopsis Silver Medal Winner: Young Adult Fiction, Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards Silver Medal Winner: Young Adult Fiction, Moonbeam Children's Books Awards For 16 year-old Woody Elmont, life in rural Georgia is a tolerable routine of caring for his aging Aunt Zee, hanging out with his friend Natalie, or minding his developmentally disabled younger brother, Tick, who was born "a few pickles short of a barrel" and has "a temperament more rambunctious than a ferret." It is Tick's uncontrollable kleptomania that lands him in a nearby home for troubled youth, from which he soon disappears, thereby propelling Woody on a grand and improbable cross-country adventure to learn the truth of his brother's fate. Risking life and limb for duty's sake, Woody careens through events and characters both intriguing and menacing, through the South, the Plains, and deep into the West. Closing in on the truth, his quest becomes increasingly a journey of hardship, courage, and startling self-discovery. Author's Notes Calling Out Your Name is probably my best effort at structuring the plot of a novel before getting past page two or three. It's told in the first person by Woody, who can't possibly know what's going on with other characters in the book - their histories and actions that have much to do with how the story finally resolves. I don't think it's revealing too much to say there are clues here and there to a story framework that's far beyond Woody's ability to know. A few who've read this book have asked me when it takes place (!) and therein lies a tale. Years ago, when I worked in public television, I had the pleasure of getting to know the late Jean Shepherd, radio raconteur, storyteller, and author of the story collection, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. Shepherd set many of his stories - including the popular movie A Christmas Story - in what he called "the universal past." This created an enormous headache for production designers and props people, who wanted to know if a car or radio would be vintage 40s, 50s, or 60s. Shepherd insisted that there be no consistency in the period look of his films - that the stories belonged to an indefinite previous time that's part of our collective memory of youth and childhood. I was inspired by Shepherd to do the same with this novel. It's set somewhere in the broad sweep of mid-to-late twentieth century, after the early civil rights movement but before cell phones and video games. It's a time when the South was still sleepy and more gently-paced, a time I feel is evocative and alluring but can't be linked to a particular year or even decade. Getting Woody's character right was easy: like so many native Georgians I've come to know, Woody has a kind heart, an easygoing disposition, and a gentle modesty... but I've also endowed him (I hope!) with a dry wit and sharp sense of irony. Getting his voice right took a bit more time. I have to thank (again) friends raised in the rural south for their colorful colloquialisms and musical cadence. This book owes much to a literary lineage that includes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Robert Lewis Taylor's 1958 Pulitzer-Prize winning The Travels of Jamie McPheeters. I am a huge fan of both novels and, having taught them in secondary school, I know them pretty well. They're in the genre of picaresque adventures - travelling stories where the hero experiences a chain of events that are not structurally interrelated, where things just happen. So it is with Woody's journey, although some surprise connections do occur. Calling Out Your Name is written for young adults - generally in the 12-16 age range. But the most enthusiastic readers so far are much older, and if I had any idea why this is so I'd tell you. |
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