My first encounter with the writing of Gary D. Schmidt has left me awed and a bit envious. In Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, he creates a gripping coming-of-age story, a tale of love and injustice that can change the lives of the children who read it. And he does it with enviable artistry, much like Cat Weatherill, whose work I wrote about earlier.
For a review of the story, see my book blog. Here I’ll focus on his style.
Schmidt is a master of repetition and the rhythm it creates. I love the way he uses both repetition and variation in this passage. Each successive sentence grows longer as it echoes and expands the one before it.
“Pitch one,” she said.
So he did. The first was too high and fell short. The second was too long and lobbed over her head. But…the third went somewhere in the middle, and Lizzie, Lizzie of the steady eye and firm hand, Lizzie Bright Griffin swung and hit the stone dead center. In fact, every time Turner pitched her a stone within shouting distance, she hit it dead center—no matter how high the arch, no matter how straight the descent.
Here Schmidt uses a series of three phrases to provide information about a character. The repetition of words and the vivid, concrete language convey in one sentence the work of a lifetime.
[Turner] took Reverend Griffin’s hand. He wasn’t surprised that it was strong, but he was surprised by how he felt every scar that ridged the man’s palm, every cut drawn through by a quick and sharp pull on a fishline, every slit opened by an accidental knife.
(I’m reminded of Robert Newton Peck’s advice in Secrets of Successful Fiction to always show our readers the hands of our characters.)
At one point Turner needs desperately to see Lizzie, and he goes to the edge of the river in hopes of finding her. Through repetition and use of numbers Schmidt captures perfectly the thoughts and actions of a child forced to wait as his hopes diminish. And don’t miss that wonderful metaphor at the end of the paragraph:
He waited to see if Lizzie might come around the point. He counted waves and told himself that he would leave after twenty-five had tumbled in. After that, he skipped rocks and told himself he would leave after he skipped one seven times. (He did it with the eleventh stone.) After that, he counted fifty gulls—except they came almost all at once. And then, with nothing left to count, Turner climbed back up the ledges, with a pile of loneliness on his back as heavy as nightfall.
