The Saturday Boy by David Fleming (review)

Narrator Derek Lamb, a fifth-grader whose father has been flying an Apache helicopter in Afghanistan for half of Derek's life, is having a particularly rough year. Besides his usual classroom problems, which derive from his glib mouth and wandering mind, he finds himself suddenly tormented by Budgie, who used to be his best friend. Mom tells Derek to be the bigger man in the face of the bullying, but in the heat of the moment, Derek forgets that advice and plays right into the hands of Budgie and their drama-thirsty classmates. There's a ray of hope for social redemption when Derek is cast in the school play, but before he makes his stage debut, his mother lapses into a profound depression, his aunt Josie arrives to take household control, and Derek only finds out through a television newscast that his father has been shot down, gone missing, and finally confirmed dead. Never a paragon of self-control, Derek focuses his rage into retaliation against Budgie. Their backstage confrontation, which spills out into a seriocomic onstage smackdown, actually helps bring the extent of the bullying problem to adult attention, to clear the air between the two ex-buddies, and to redirect Derek's energy to pulling himself and Mom through this dark time. Debut novelist Fleming ably limns Derek's manic, Joey Pigza-styled interior life with a light hand, capturing the humorous aspects of the boy's self-perpetuating problems. Thoughtful readers, though, will recognize that Derek's been dealt a tough hand to play, and they may even pause to wonder whether any of their own goofy classmates are privately burdened.