It's 1968. The Vietnam War and Apollo 11 are in the background, and between a war in a distant land and a spacecraft heading to the moon, Doug Swieteck starts a new life in tiny Marysville, N.Y. He hates "stupid Marysville," so far from home and his beloved Yankee Stadium, and he may have moved away, but his cruel father and abusive brothers are still with him. Readers of the Newbery HonorwinningThe Wednesday Wars(2007) will remember Doug, now less edgy and gradually more open to the possibilities of life in a small town. Each chapter opens with a print of a John James Audubon painting, and Mr. Powell, the town librarian, teaches Doug to paint and see the world as an artist. He meets pretty Lillian Spicer, just the feisty friend Doug needs, and a whole cast of small-town characters opens Doug to what he might be in the world. This is Schmidt's best novel yetdarker thanThe Wednesday Warsand written with more restraint, but with the same expert attention to voice, character and big ideas. By the end of this tale, replete with allusions toOur Town, Doug realizes he's pretty happy in Marysville, where holding hands with the green-eyed girland a first kissrival whatever might be happening on the moon.(Historical fiction. 10-14)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Gr 6-9-A forced move from Long Island to upstate New York in the late 1960s leaves Doug Swieteck on his own to deal with his reprehensible dad and bad-boy older brothers. His salvation comes largely from kind strangers who help to nurture his talents and his humanity. Schmidt's masterful characterization and balance of humor and pathos make this coming-of-age novel so memorable. (Apr.) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Gary D. Schmidt tells a tale of an eighth grader's healing and discovery through art. WE slip conventionally enough into "Okay for Now" when a city kid behind a whole rack of metaphorical eight balls heads to a new school in a Catskill backwater. He's Douglas Swieteck, an eighth grader last seen in Gary D. Schmidt's much praised "Wednesday Wars," to which this book plays sequel, though it very much stands on its own. In the literature of outsiders, Doug is as far out there as any. He's troubled by his two brothers: one a bully, the other absent. When the coach divides his gym class into shirts and skins, Doug has a truly horrifying reason that he can't run around gym class without a shirt, courtesy of a father who is almost too horrible to be believed. And, oh yes, he has a reading disability. But beneath the jumble of tragedy and tragicomedy is a story about the healing power of art and about a boy's intellectual awakening. The healing begins in a room at the top of the public library, where an enormous book under glass, Audubon's "Birds of America," lies open lo a picture of a falling bird. "It was the most terrifying picture I had ever seen. The most beautiful." Doug traces the lines of the bird - wings, beak and frightened eye - on the fogging glass. Then he steals the card that identifies it as an Arctic tern. Happily, Doug lives in a world where an unhappy boy in desperate need of guidance is passed from one nurturing adult to the next, beginning with the elderly librarian, Mr. Powell. who reaches past Doug's defenses to teach him how to draw the birds that have moved him so. Meanwhile, as Doug studies "Jane Eyre" in English class, Charlotte Brontë's diction begins to seep into his vocabulary, just as Audubon's birds seep into his soul. Next he takes up Aaron Copland. This is a kid who once counted as his sole hero the Yankees' Joe Pepitene. "Okay for Now" is crowded with more incident and empowerment than any eighth-grade year or novel can quite contain. Events stretch credulity. At one point, Doug turns up briefly on the Broadway stage, playing a female role, no less. But Schmidt is a master of the unlikely. Most of the narrative revolves around a quest. Doug has to help preserve Audubon's great book when it becomes an endangered species itself, as the town council begins to sell off individual plates. The story takes place in 1968, with Doug's family driving their pickup down to Port Authority to collect a brother, home from Vietnam. But centered on lives badly balanced on the ragged edge of survival and uprooted by poverty, with a distant war rumbling in the background, inaudible to some people, deafening to others, this is a novel that could easily have been set in the present. '"You folks waiting for a kid in a wheelchair?'" the bus driver asks. "'No,' said my father." But it turns out they are. They then have to navigate Doug's older brother, who has lost both his eyesight and his legs, through the angry crowd of an antiwar rally. I read it all through misting eyes. Flirting with despair on its way to affirmation, "Okay for Now" is about how one kid, among legions, has to reach beyond his family for help from the other adults in his life to give him a hand. "You know what it feels like," Doug says to his wounded brother and Mr. Powell, "to stroke color onto an Arctic tern flying off the page, going wherever he wants to go?" "Terrific." And so is this book.

Bad-boy Doug Swieteck from The Wednesday Wars (rev. 7/07) -- grudgingly respected for his bravado (he knew 410 ways to get a teacher to hate you) but feared because of his bullying older brother -- is back in a stand-alone story. Readers meet Doug's mean-spirited father, a man Doug dislikes but unconsciously emulates. When the family moves upstate after Mr. Swieteck's temper gets him fired, Doug's discontent mirrors his father's. They live in a "stupid" town, in a house Doug christens "The Dump," and people sit on stoops because there isn't "any boring thing else to do in boring Marysville." But what "boring" Marysville, New York, offers Doug is something unexpected: kindness and a future. He gets a part-time job; meets Lil, a sweet love interest; has teachers willing to teach him (as Schmidt gradually reveals, his need is dire); and, above all, is captivated by a book of Audubon bird prints when a caring librarian helps Doug discover a talent for composition and art appreciation. Schmidt incorporates a myriad of historical events from the 1968 setting (the moon landing, a broken brother returning from Vietnam, the My Lai massacre) that make some of the improbable plot turns (the father's sudden redemption, for example) all the more unconvincing. Still, Doug's story emerges through a distinctive voice that reflects how one beat-up kid can become a young man who knows that the future holds "so much for him to find." betty carter (c) Copyright 2011. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This companion to The Wednesday Wars follows the formula of Schmidt's Newbery Honor winner with less success. Doug Swieteck, a prankster in the previous book, has graver problems than Holling Hoodhood did, making the interplay of pathos and slapstick humor an uneasy fit. In summer 1968, the Swietecks leave Long Island for the Catskills, where Doug's father has found work. Doug's mother (like Holling's) is kind but ineffectual; Mr. Swieteck is a brutish jerk. His abuse of his three sons, one of whom is currently in Vietnam, happens mostly offstage, but one episode of unthinkable cruelty is recounted as a flashback to explain why Doug refuses to take off his shirt in gym class. Doug does make two key friends: Lil, whose father owns the deli for which Doug becomes delivery boy, and the less fleshed-out Mr. Powell, a librarian who instantly sees Doug's potential as an artist. There are lovely moments, but the late addition of an implausible subplot in which Lil, who has never shown an interest in acting, is drafted for a role in a Broadway play, seems desultory considering the story's weightier elements. Ages 10-14. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* In this stand-alone companion to The Wednesday Wars (2007), a Newbery Honor Book set in the late 1960s, Schmidt focuses on Holling Hoodhood's classmate Doug Swieteck, who is furious when his volatile father gets fired and moves the family to tiny Marysville, New York. Eighth grade gets off to a rocky start, particularly after Doug's brother is blamed for a series of local break-ins, and Doug, too, is viewed with suspicion. Life at home with his hard-drinking dad is rocky as well, especially after Doug's second brother returns from Vietnam without his legs. In addition to brief character references, this title shares much with The Wednesday Wars. Here, John James Audubon's portraits of birds, rather than Shakespeare's plays, provide a cultural awakening, and once again, Schmidt skillfully makes a reluctant boy's connection with the works a plausible and moving catalyst for strength and growth. Schmidt stretches credibility with another wish-fulfilling ending, but readers will likely forgive any plot contrivances as they enjoy Doug's distinctive, rhythmic narration, inventively peppered wit. stat. about his life, which reveals hard, sometimes shocking truths about the time period and, most of all, Doug's family. Delivered in a wholly believable voice, Doug's euphemisms are heartbreaking and authentic, as when he describes his dad's violence. He has quick hands. Reproductions of Audubon plates introduce each chapter in this stealthily powerful, unexpectedly affirming story of discovering and rescuing one's best self, despite family pressure to do otherwise.--Engberg, Gillia. Copyright 2010 Booklist