Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt
Realistic Fiction; 360 pages
While Doug struggles to be more than the thug that his teachers and the police think him to be, he finds an unlikely ally in Lil Spicer, as they explore Audubon’s art.
Sam’s review:
Doug Swieteck, a minor character in the excellent book The Wednesday Wars, gets his chance to tell his story in Okay for Now. The book starts with Doug’s blowhard dad losing his job, forcing the family to move from Manhattan to a small town in upstate New York. Doug hates the new town but makes friends with the grocer’s daughter, Lil, and gets a job doing deliveries on Saturday mornings. These deliveries lead to surprising connections, as does Doug’s weekly sessions drawing the birds from a treasured volume of Audubon’s Birds of America under the direction of the art-inclined librarian. When Doug discovers that the precious pages are missing because they are being sold to support the library, he takes on a mission to recover them. Bringing together the fragments of this book becomes a rich metaphor of his own life. What makes the Okay for Now especially engaging is Doug himself, who tells his story with a mixture of sarcasm, humor, and honesty. I did not want the book to end!