Aim

Reviewed by: Carla McAllister - New Gloucester Public Library, New Gloucester, Maine, Southern Maine Library District

Review Date: April 26, 2017

Review

It's 1941 and Junior Bledsoe is 14 years old and living in Hickory, North Carolina. His Pop teaches him to shoot and schools him in how to aim straight and true. The times in the woods with his Pop are among the best of times with his father; he also enjoys handing his father tools upon request as his father is a very astute shade tree mechanic. But Pop struggles with alcohol, gambling, and tolerating his own father who has recently moved in with the family. When Pop dies unexpectedly and under somewhat suspicious circumstances, Junior is left to do all the chores at home, share his room with his extremely negative and curmudgeonly grandfather, decide whether or not to quit school, where he is forced to use his right hand to perfect the Palmer Method even though he is left-handed, and trying to figure out how to live down being Axel Beldsoe's namesake. Perhaps he should take a job at the mill that his father despised. He desperately wants to earn respect for the Bledsoe family and attempts to lie about his age to join the Army when WWII breaks out. While trying to find his true aim in life, he takes many missteps and learns, at last, that his first goal must be to earn self-respect. Written in a time when things were much different than the present, young adult readers will be drawn into a world of rationing, saving scrap metal and rubber for the cause, and learning to write in cursive were what everyday life was about.

Overall Book Score: very good