Pay Attention, Carter Jones by Gary Schmidt

This book is not as good as the author’s Okay for Now, which I still maintain should have won the Newbery Medal, or at least an honor, but Pay Attention, Carter Jones is still a good story about a boy with father issues growing into a young man who knows his own mind and his own strength. With help of an English butler, August Paul Bowles-Fitzpatrick and the game of cricket, Carter Jones learns to “make good decisions and remember who you are.”

Mr. Bowles-Fitzpatrick is the perfect British gentleman’s gentleman and counterpart to Mary Poppins, only with a cricket bat instead of a parrot-headed umbrella. (Actually, Mr.Bowles Fitzpatrick has an umbrella, too, “an umbrella as big as a satellite disk.”) Carter Jones, whose father has not yet returned from his army deployment in Germany, is a typical American sixth grade boy trying to take care of his mom, his dog, and his two sisters while dad is away. When the former, Mr. Bowles Fitzpatrick, shows up on the doorstep of the latter, Carter, and says he’s been sent to serve the family while dad is deployed, Carter is grateful, but confused. Not only does the butler speak in a manner that is befitting a British gentleman (“you say everything like you want it to smell good”), but Mr. Bowles-Fitzpatrick just doesn’t seem to understand that he’s in the United States of America now, not Britain. He serves tea snd cookies for an afternoon snack. He has a different on the Boston Tea Party, and indeed on the entire war that Americans call the Revolution. And he wants Carter to learn to play cricket.

Unfortunately for me, I got lost toward the end of the book when Carter finally reconnects with his mostly-absent father on a father-son trip to Australia. I lost the thread of the story with the trip back to Australia and the dad and the clouds, and I just zoned out. I guess I need to re-read and pay attention! But I had to return the book to the library.

Final verdict: good characters, good themes of honor and forgiveness, lots of cricket, and a British accent. Recommended.

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