Sweetwater by Lawrence Yep
201 pages
Published 1973
Read March 9
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Outside
of a few scattered weeks of first grade, I never went to school. And
aside from a few halfhearted runs through exercise books immediately
before and after first grade, my father never bothered teaching me at
home, either. He bought my brother and I textbooks for two or three
years, but after a while he never bothered to make us sit down and do
the exercises. Instead, I taught myself from a very early age, reading
those textbooks -- and everything else I could get my hands on -- on my
own initiative, for my own pleasure. As luck would have it, I was always
curious, with a nerdy bent. Bored of my stupid workbooks with their
friendly bears, I plowed through my brother's English and social studies
textbooks, four grades ahead of mine and thus far more stimulating.
Those early '90s grade school textbooks (bought at wholesale prices from
the Oklahoma City schoolbook depository) nurtured my early love of
reading with short stories and extracts from books like The Hobbit, Kon-Tiki, and some random Pern novel. One of the extracts that made a particular impression on me came from Sweetwater,
a book which, until now, I have never gotten the chance to read in its
entirety; I graduated to abridged dollar store editions of Verne and
Twain by 8, and then to the unabridged versions and Michael Crichton by
10, without bothering with juvenile / young adult material whatsoever.
Nonetheless, after all these years, images of a creepy bug dude (who
always reminded young me somehow of Mr. Miyagi) teaching a boy to play
the flute, and the friendly old fiddler asking for sweet water, have
lingered, as vivid in my imagination as things that actually happened to
me. Reading the first chapter now was more than a bit surreal -- it's
been at least twenty-two years since I read these words, yet every
incident and turn of phrase still felt recent and familiar, so much so
that the odd word or paragraph expurgated by those long-ago
textbook-compilers felt entirely out of place. Memory is unsettling like
that.
Skipping from English primers directly to cheap editions
of the classics, I haven't had much exposure to juvenile literature. The
only ones I know, I read as an adult: the Harry Potter series (good),
His Dark Materials (started strong but ended abysmally), and Hatchet.
Compared with all of those, Yep seems to be writing for a younger
audience. There's just a hint of talking down to his readers, something I
found entirely lacking in the other juvenile books I've read. It didn't
bother me as much once I got into the story; either that or Yep's prose
found a better balance once the bulk of the backstory and scene-setting
was out of the way.
I was pleasantly surprised that the alien
bug dude actually had his own motivations instead of being a Mr. Miyagi
of the flute for the visiting white boy. The plot wasn't intricate by
any means -- in fact it was positively trite, in the "traditionalist
family faces off against rapacious developers" mold, something I never
guessed from that long-ago excerpt. Nevertheless, all in all Sweetwater
was cute and sweet in a simple way. It isn't a lost classic by any
means, but I'm glad I finally read it after all these years. My rating
here gets something of a boost from the nostalgia factor. Also, Julia
Noonan's illustrations were delightfully, unabashedly 1970s, as you can
see here. (My caption: "I am so high right now.")
Now if only my library's copy of Julie of the Wolves would reappear...
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