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"Who was
The Changer?" I asked him. He had mentioned once or twice
the Changer.
A lot of this stuff didn't make sense at all.
"The Supreme Being," Mother said. She bit her lower
lip and wiped her hand on her apron, as if to ease her words....
"Maybe you could write about The Changer," Jesse said.
He was into it, now.
"It's your paper. I'm just trying to help. Let's stick with
Coyote."...
So anyway, we did it. Jesse wrote up this paper, and he kept
saying, "Aw, this is no good." But it was. We got in
Jesse's words and punctuation, and it was a really good paper.
I still believe that.
When Miss Drees handed it back, however, it was bleeding red
ink. She'd corrected it with an axe. I mean, he got a C on it,
which Jesse thought was great, and I said, "You see? You
can write." But it really got to me. If I had handed in
that paper, it wouldn't have gotten that treatment. She'd written
a big red WHAT'S THE POINT on it. THESIS???
Well, the point -- and I didn't push it after that -- was that
Jesse's stuff didn't really apply. That was the thesis.
The steady, tempered, and hip voice of this wonderful novel is
narrator Wade Curren, the local high school sports hero in a
small Oregon town where such status brings its own raucous dignity.
Perhaps even louder in this text, however, is the reader's knowledge
of who the town expects Jesse to be: in the opening lines, Wade
tells us that, "The rap on Jesse -- one of the raps on Jesse
-- was that he wasn't very smart." Coming of age in Cody's
novel, though, means that Wade enters a world of knowledge unmeasured
by any scholastic standard achievement test, as illustrated by
the quote above.
Jesse Howell
is a teen who has transferred into the Pacific Northwestern high
school scene, bringing his own indigenous Klamath heritage and
beliefs along. His world and ideas become the pivotal factors
of change, as Wade, a bright young girl named Lorna, and Jesse
each determine life beyond the river, in this 1960's milieu.
Pick a social
ill: racism; poverty; gender-bias; educational disadvantage...Cody
imbues his central characters with the largesse of mind and greatness
of spirit to overcome and re-shape the odds.
Recommended highly
for both juvenile and adult readers, Ricochet River is
that rare contemporary novel that satisfies far more than the
easy questions about "multiculturalism" today.
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