Powell, who reaches past Doug’s defenses to teach him how to draw the birds that have moved him so. 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. Then he steals the card that identifies it as an Arctic tern. The most beautiful.”ĭoug traces the lines of the bird - wings, beak and frightened eye - on the fogging glass. “It was the most terrifying picture I had ever seen. 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 to a picture of a falling bird. And, oh yes, he has a reading disability.īut beneath the jumble of tragedy and tragicomedy is a story about the healing power of art and about a boy’s intellectual awakening. 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. He’s troubled by his two brothers: one a bully, the other absent. In the literature of outsiders, Doug is as far out there as any. Schmidt’s much praised “Wednesday Wars,” to which this book plays sequel, though it very much stands on its own. He’s Douglas Swieteck, an eighth grader last seen in Gary D. 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.
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