Antil delivers heartfelt messages of caring and hope in a wholesome young-adult adventure.

It was 1953 and the family farm was alive and well in upstate New York. Whole communities came together to celebrate the harvest or rally around those in need. The shadows of World War II still hovered over the people and colored their lives. In The Book of Charlie, Jerome Mark Antil paints a charming and nostalgic picture of this time and place through the further adventures of the Pompey Hollow Book Club.

In this second book of the series, the kids of the book club are now teenagers, but their appetite for adventure hasn’t faded. When one of them notices a couple of strangers casing the countryside, apparently in search of items to steal, the club is drawn into a mystery bigger than they could have imagined. With the help of President Eisenhower’s grandson, the club president’s pen pal, the group embarks on a journey that intertwines with a war-era military mystery, pulling in a few lost souls along the way.

In this story, it’s easy to see how Antil is influenced by Mark Twain. The narrator, Charlie Pitts, is an old neighbor who passed away in the last book and is now the kids’ guardian angel. His colloquial voice, heavily colored in the local dialect and tinged with wry humor—along with the rural landscape and escapades where childhood innocence bumps up against the fears of the time—are reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn. Though some may find the story to be a little too rambling and saccharine at times, Antil manages to deliver heartfelt messages of caring and hope in a lighthearted, wholesome adventure. “You might take a lesson from this, the ways it was with young people in those days; days when young ones thought more about people around them than they did about their own selves,” Charlie suggests. “Some say it were the quality of their Guardian Angels back then.”

While aimed at a young-adult audience, this book will also appeal to older generations who would enjoy either reminiscing about their childhood or just taking a break from the eleven-o’clock-news style of entertainment to read a book that acknowledges serious issues (such as war, crime, and disease) while remaining eternally optimistic and sweet.

Raucous adventure abounds in Antil’s (The Long Stem Is in the Lobby, 2013 etc.) heartfelt coming-of-age novel set in upstate New York during the 1950s.

Fans of Antil’s The Pompey Hollow Book Club (2011) will be eager to learn more about the misadventures of their favorite club members in this colorful follow-up novel. It’s the summer before their freshman year of high school, a time when they begin to leave childhood behind but are nonetheless itching for adventure as much as ever. The story is told from the perspective of ghostly Ole Charlie, a kindly neighbor who has passed and is now the group’s guardian angel. Fast-paced and action-packed, the novel follows young Jerry and his friends as they get their first jobs, rescue orphans and down-on-their-luck polio victims, and plan their biggest caper yet to catch a pair of criminals. Though the intrigue surrounding the two escaped criminals and the subsequent plan to flush them out are what pushes the novel forward, its heartbeat lies in the quiet moments that reveal the character of this close-knit community. Following World War II, which forever changed their lives, these communities have emerged stronger than ever. The people work together, care for each other’s kids, rally behind perfect strangers with abounding kindness and believe in the basic good in each person. As the kids of the surrounding communities all come together to protect their towns, a beautiful sense of brotherhood emerges; it’s an uplifting examination of what community really means. History buffs will also appreciate the many referencesto WWII, Gen. Eisenhower and decoy missions in England before D-day. Not without its faults, the novel is sometimes difficult to read. Readers will appreciate the unique language of the time period, but some sentences, especially in opening chapters, are unusually long and need to be read several times for clarity. Nevertheless, it’s a delightful read.

A beautiful balance of action and warmth.