Ghost Boy by Iain Lawrence
Delacorte, 2000
11/11/11 Category: Young Adult

Ghost Boy is a beautifully written historical fiction about being different, set in a time when old-fashioned circuses were dying out but hadn’t yet completely vanished from the American scene.  The titular character is an albino boy named Harold Kline, mocked and despised by the other kids in his small town for looking different, emotionally isolated from his family after his father and brother’s deaths in World War II and his mother’s remarriage to a man who doesn’t know how to deal with a damaged teenager. When the circus comes to town, Harold encounters the freaks—the diminutive Tina, the ogreish “Fossil Man,” and the enigmatic Gypsy Magda. More importantly, he learns of the Cannibal King, supposedly a barbarian from darkest Africa who happens to be an albino like Harold. Harold leaves home to follow the circus, always hoping to meet the Cannibal King who is always just ahead, scouting for the circus. But he finds his real talent is with the elephants, three sad creatures who are all that is left of the once-great menagerie. His idea to teach the elephants to play baseball as a gambit to draw audiences wins him the affections of Flip, a beautiful young horse trainer who doesn’t seem to care that Harold is different. But when he is torn between the genuine affection of the freaks and the lure of being treated as a normal person, Harold’s life is turned upside down, and he’s forced to grow up fast.

Iain Lawrence writes a beautiful book. You can’t help but be drawn in to the world he depicts, this post-war era in which the economy is recovering, but these little circuses that used to attract huge crowds are disappearing. Lawrence’s characterization is excellent, if a little too obvious. Unlike Harold, we know that Harold’s desperate love for Flip isn’t fully returned; we know that his choice to abandon his real friends when he’s teased about being a freak is going to end badly; we can see that the circus owner cares more about survival than he does about Harold. It all comes across, barely, as dramatic irony, but from a different perspective, it just makes you want to slap Harold so he’ll see the truth. If Lawrence’s skill as a writer weren’t so great, you could pass this book off as just another after-school special about believing in yourself and The True Meaning of Diversity.

That said, there’s still a lot to enjoy about this book. Harold’s sessions with the elephants are funny and intriguing, the more so when you realize that Lawrence based the idea of elephants playing baseball on a true story of English circus elephants who learned to play cricket. The melancholy mood of the story is a perfect fit for the growing despair of everyone in the circus, which will have to be disbanded if they can’t pull off a hit show in Salem, Oregon. Harold’s wild idea is what they all hitch their hopes to, so that the difficulties the elephants have in, for example, learning to throw the ball increase the tension of the story. The ending is tragic in some ways, redemptive in others, and while I knew all along that something really bad had to happen (one of the other sources of tension is the hostility Harold faces from Flip’s large, strong boyfriend), I could never have predicted what finally did happen, despite its being hinted at almost from the beginning.

Ghost Boy is an excellent story, maybe not the most polished young adult novel ever, but definitely worth reading if you’re in the mood for something sad and a little bit terrible.