Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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It was late morning on an early summer Sunday in 1974. I had finished my first year away at college and was sitting in the passenger seat of my little brother's pickup. Jimmy was giving me a tour through the dusty back lanes of our new town. As we came around a curve on a winding road, we encountered a pair of seagulls weaving on the pavement as if broken windup toys--each appeared to be limping on one leg with the opposite wing outstretched to keep from totally falling over. There was a booming that sounded like fireworks.

The sound of shotguns became clearer as Jimmy dodged dozens more birds--dead and dying. He turned onto a dirt trail leading to a clearing, where I got to meet some of his new buddies. As I was told during introductions, they were busy working on altering the migratory patterns of the seagulls. I politely declined their offer to take a shot or two.

For years my parents had been itching to move from the suburban house in Commack where we'd spent the previous decade. But anxious to avoid disrupting my scholastic program, as well as the extracurricular and community activities I'd been deeply involved in, they patiently awaited my finishing high school and departing for UConn before heading off to find the East End home they'd been dreaming of.

While Commack was a rather white community--redlining still having been a factor when we'd moved to that house in the early 60s--it was a relatively innocent place in the sense that we'd all arrived there at the same time. Everyone was a "new kid" or had been one recently enough that I never felt or heard kids picking on a kid for being a newer-comer.

I learned over that first summer of living in the Hamptons that there was a side that I'd never seen on those couple of long summer vacations we'd taken out there when we were little kids. There was a year-round population that had been living there since the 1640s, and they were a far different breed than the tourists who filled the villages to the brim in the summertime. These were people who stayed generation after generation, and who had contempt for the tourists and their money, as well as newcomers who had the audacity not to clear out at the end of the summer.

Those ten years between Commack and California never saw me once feeling, as Claire says it, "like a native (meaning born and raised here, as opposed to meaning 'savage')." I might have developed friendships among the activist subculture and partied with a group of sensitive young musicians, but the year I left for the West Coast, I could still feel those "native" guys in their pickups driving by and shaking their heads at me.

"While I'm dissecting the fog, I'm searching what I know of his entire life for the answers to what happened, not just those last few minutes. Why did he really come to Hackett? Why was I drawn to him, and nobody else was? What was Lani Garver? Was he one of those super-kind gay boys that certain girls love to bare their souls to? Is his body caught under some sunken boat wreck that will prevent it from ever being found? Or did he escape? Are there other Claires out there, and is he busy making another basket case into a rational, useful member of the human race? Was Lani Garver an angel? If I knew the answers to who Lani was and what he was, I would have more peace accepting where he was."

So asks Claire, who tells us the story of WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER. It is a horror story about a person--well, let's say, a being--who arrives with his mother on Hackett Island, where Claire is a native. Sporting an unusual hairstyle and graced with delicate features, it is unclear whether LANI (pronounced "Lonny") is a boy or a girl. This sure ain't no native! And so, the next generation of the good 'ol boys get set to make this strange newcomer "welcome."

Claire is a native. Her boyfriend is a member of the fish frat--"that's the sons of Hackett's commercial fishermen, who are sometimes lifeguards and usually very hunky." Her friends think she should be happy, set in her position among the high school elite, healthy after missing most of junior high due to treatments for acute juvenile leukemia.

But Claire, who still has her share of problems, sees the neatly folded boxes of her life crumble when she becomes friends with Lani. And what happens as a result is a tense tale that won't let you go.

"We don't talk about the drowning around the island. We don't really talk about what led up to it, either. If I hear Lani's name, it's usually in mentions of him having gone to our high school for only two days, and isn't that weird, as if the greater mysteries never existed. Maybe that's the way people need to remember it."

While reading WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER, my stomach all knotted up, I kept asking myself, "Could a whole group of kids really be this horrible?" But as I consider the outrageous hate crimes we've seen publicized in recent years, think back to what was still happening to African-Americans during my childhood, and think about what it felt like to be among the East End natives, I see that it's all too real.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com