As suggested earlier, Okay For Now is far too familiar as a story, and way too “on-the-nose” in its telling.Įxamples of this are numerous, and listing them all might would come across as harping, or would give away some major plot points. Marked shifts in the first-person internal monologue, and very metacognitive analyses of the significance of various bird paintings and other events, leave the reader in no uncertainty as to the thematic significance of this bird’s eye, or of that bird’s wing. So when Doug, in a creative but subtle plan of redemption, begins recovering prints missing from the book, there’s a sense in which he’s restoring something missing both in himself and in the town. Not only do these paintings become the incidental cause for Doug’s development as a young artist, but they are oracles of his own life, external icons on which he projects his own problems. With each new painting, we learn something new about elements of composition, and about Doug. The book of Audubon’s paintings plays a central thematic role.

He encounters beauty in a girl name Lil Spicer to whom he eventually grows close, and also in a book of priceless bird paintings by John James Audubon. Truth, to the extent that it’s an ideal in this novel, comes in the form of Doug’s acquisition of various practical skills that humanize him, and in his facing embarrassing facts about his life, without which personal and public honesty he cannot move toward healing. The encounter with goodness comes through kind and perceptive adults who are able to see past Doug’s sarcastic front, and who guide him toward specific goals.

At the same time, chance encounters with goodness, beauty, and truth begin to effect in him a process of inner transformation that eventually spills out to improve the whole town. He struggles to belong in a new community and in a new school, and he finds himself on the wrong side of several rather cruel adults. Between his frustrated, factory worker father’s “quick hands”, and his violent older brother, Doug has learned to keep his soul well-insulated behind a mildly sarcastic exterior. Others, feeling that they have encountered the same story several hundred times already, and underwhelmed by its on-the-nose prose, may find themselves politely perplexed at its status as a National Book Award finalist.Īs the story begins, things go from bad to worse for middle schooler Doug Swieteck when his troubled family moves from New York City to the small, upstate town of Marysville. Some will see it as a heart-warming redemption story, easily read, but not without a few nice literary touches, and a few surprising plot twists.

Containing nothing overtly offensive, but composed almost entirely of elements you’ve seen or read before, the novel is likely to generate some very different reactions among its readers. Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt is a familiar-feeling tale of personal growth set in the late 60s.

Okay for now book