I love reading “first day of school” books at the beginning
of September, and found Bluefish by
Pat Schmatz just in time. Bluefish begins
with Travis’s first day at a new school navigating his locker combination:
“slowly spinning the dial. Seventeen…back to the left…” Over the summer, Travis
has had to abruptly relocate from the small farmhouse that he shared with his
grandfather and their dog Roscoe to a new town, a new house, and a new school.
And the biggest change of all is that Roscoe isn’t with them any more; Travis
couldn’t find him before they had to move, and he holds onto the hope that
Roscoe is like one of those dogs he’s read about in the newspaper, those dogs
who wander hundreds of miles from an old house to a new one to find their
owners. Travis even attempts to speed up the process by leaving school early
and walking in the direction of the old farmhouse to resume his search.
Travis’s story is interwoven with Velveeta’s. Velveeta (her
real name is Vida) is in Travis’s class, and her journal entries give a
first-person account of how she’s dealing with starting a new year of school
after a tumultuous summer. She spends most of her time in an abandoned trailer
in the trailer park she lives in that once belonged to an older man named
Calvin, a place that is “the safest and best place I know.” Velveeta takes
refuge from her absent mom and drug dealer brother, and writes, “Everything’s exactly
the same except for how much you’re not here. The empty air in this trailer
weighs eighty trillion tons, and it’s jumping up and down on my lungs like an
elephant on a trampoline. But that beats my creepy brother’s wide-alive air any
day. I’m going to stay here until he leaves.”
Both Travis and Velveeta have a secret, and both are trying
to come to terms with important events that happened to each of them the summer
before. They become unlikely friends at school, and start to ask the right
questions of one another. Velveeta learns that Travis can’t read, and with the
help of a teacher named Mr. McQueen and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, they begin to change this. Travis takes much longer
to get at the heart of Velveeta’s story, and it isn’t until near the end of the
book that he gets a clearer picture of the reality of her life, which he has
only seen glimpses of.
Travis and Velveeta are exceptional characters, and both
points of view are equally entertaining and interesting. I really enjoyed Bluefish for the way that it explored
reading, and especially Travis’s experience with learning how to read as an
adolescent.
