Product Details
Trouble

Trouble
By Gary D. Schmidt

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Product Description

“Henry Smith’s father told him that if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.”

But Trouble comes careening down the road one night in the form of a pickup truck that strikes Henry’s older brother, Franklin. In the truck is Chay Chouan, a young Cambodian from Franklin’s preparatory school, and the accident sparks racial tensions in the school—and in the well-established town where Henry’s family has lived for generations. Caught between anger and grief, Henry sets out to do the only thing he can think of: climb Mt. Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine, which he and Franklin were going to climb together. Along with Black Dog, whom Henry has rescued from drowning, and a friend, Henry leaves without his parents’ knowledge. The journey, both exhilarating and dangerous, turns into an odyssey of discovery about himself, his older sister, Louisa, his ancestry, and why one can never escape from Trouble.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #62151 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-04-21
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 304 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal
Grade 7–10—Gary D. Schmidt's novel (Clarion, 2008) presents the story of an upper class New England family's privileged life colliding with violent prejudices against immigrant Cambodians after a tragic accident. Franklin is hit and killed by a pickup truck driven by Chay, a Cambodian student in Franklin's prep school. Chay is not sent to jail, and racial tensions are sparked. Franklin and his younger brother, Henry, had planned to climb Mt. Katahdin in Maine. Henry is determined to make the climb, and one morning the boy, his best friend, and a stray dog decide to hitchhike to the mountain and are picked up by Chay. Prejudice takes on a different face entirely as Chay's personal story develops, entwined with all three boys' growing understanding of their families, their town, and what really happened the night of the accident. Jason Culp's accomplished reading moves smoothly from a quiet and neutral narration to vivid vocal depictions of each character, complete with seamless accents. This gripping, adventure-filled journey of self discovery and exploration of themes such as discrimination and forgiveness will appeal to middle and high school students.—Jane P. Fenn, Corning-Painted Post West High School, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Henry Smith’s father has made a mantra out of running from problems: “If you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” Sure enough, the Smiths live in a mansion on Boston’s North Shore that has housed the family for 300 years. But when Henry’s older brother and prep-school rugby star, Franklin, is accidentally run down by a Cambodian classmate, Chay Chouan, and lies in a coma, Henry must reconcile the perfect older-brother image with the abusive, racist jock he might really have been. Meanwhile, the town erupts into an improbably monotonal furor against the nearby immigrant community. Henry and a pal take a road trip, meet Chay, and undergo the requisite catharsis and closure along the way. Schmidt, coming off his Newbery Honor for The Wednesday Wars (2007) here focuses on the serious stuff, but handles teen levity well enough to keep readers involved. Unfortunately, this changeup mostly functions to divert from the emotional weight of loss, anger, and reconciliation, rather than to drive it home. Grades 7-10. --Ian Chipman

Review

"Nothing is at it seems when Trouble arrives in varied and symbolic ways for two families and two communities.  Franklin Smith, the arrogant scion of an aristocratic New England family, is accidentally struck while running and subsequently dies.  The blame is accepted by a classmate, a Cambodian immigrant from a nearby town.  When legal technicalities prevent Chay Chouan from being jailed, the perceived miscarriage of justice reverberates through idyllic Blythbury-by-the-Sea.  Franklin's younger brother, Henry, becomes determined to climb Mount Katahdin, a feat that Franklin had coldly suggested might prove Henry had guts.  Henry sets out hitchhiking for the mountain with best friend question.  Somewhat improbably they are picked up by Chay, who has been expelled by his father and is now driving the truck that killed Franklin.  Their symbolic journey predictably includes moments of danger, self-discovery, and reconciliation, fortunately leavened by the humorously ironic Sanborn.  Complex structure allows revelations into the character of Chay, child of a violent refugee camp, unwanted product of rape, lover of poetry, and protector of Henry's sister (in a Romeo-and-Juliet twist).  Teeming with plot elements, some of which may seem too purposeful, and richly veined with social and psychological crosscurrents, this story may be seen as allegorical in its intent and representation.  Nevertheless it contains Schmidt's eloquent language and compelling characters, as well as compassionate examinations of the passage from childhood to adulthood and of the patters of common experience and mark and unite us as humans."--School Library Journal, starred review
 
"Henry and his family live the charmed existence of the well-bred, well-heeled New England old-money crowd, exemplified by successful, professional parents, a coastal home that has been in the family for hundreds of years, and bright, athletic children attending posh private academies and always rising to the challenges expected of them.  That world shatters when Franklin, Henry's elder brother and role model, is hit by a truck belonging to Chay Chouan, the son of a Cambodian refugee, leaving Franklin with only one arm and indeterminate brain activity.  Flurries of violence erupt as Franklin's fellow lacrosse players vent their rage on the Cambodian community, and Henry begins to question whether Franklin was such a good role model after all, given as he was to racially motivated bullying even before the accident.  Henry decides that he needs to follow through on a plan that Franklin used to taunt him with, climbing a dangerous mountain as a rite of passage into Franklin's kind of macho manhood.  Henry's version of the plan, though, leads to forgiveness as he hitches a ride with Chay of all people, and he learns secrets about his brother, his sister, and Chay that lead him to quesion the kind of person he wants to be.  Schmidt creates a rich and credible world peopled with fully developed characters who have a lot of complex reasoning to do, reckoning that involves confronting issues of white privilege and responsibility for racial reconciliation and acceptance.  In the midst of the drama, a hurricane uncovers a burned-out slave ship that belonged to Henry's ancestor; its presence, along with an encounter with some Vietnam vets, ups the ante on the white guilt message just in case you weren't paying attention, and thus seems a bit gratuitous.  Schmidt's prose, however, is flawless, and Henry's odyssey of growth and understanding is pitch-perfect and deeply satisfying."--Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
 
"If you build your house far enough from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you."  Such is the credo of the fortunate Smith family of Blythbury-by-the-Sea, a (fictional) WASP-y outpost of Boston.  But when Trouble arrives, it just keeps on coming.  First, oldest son Franklin lies in a coma after being hit by a car; a young Cambodian immigrant is identified as the driver.  Daughter Louisa, hugely distraught, retreats to her bedroom, and fourteen-year-old Henry is left on his own.  With the newly adopted Black Dog, whom he's rescued from the sea, Henry sets off to climb Maine's Mt. Katahdin (as he and Franklin had planned to do together) and is joined by unexpected companions.  Schmidt embarks on a road trip that limns the growing friendship of three unforgettable boys-Henry; his honest, aggravating best friend Sanborn; and the accused Cambodian boy, Chay Chuan.  A host of coincidences strains credulity at times, but also allows for an extraordinary breadth, widening themes and resolving plot lines.  Like Chaucer's pilgrims, Henry, Chay, and Louisa all have to find their way to grace.  The accident that brings trouble to Henry and his family also brings self-realization and the uncomfortable knowledge that both Henry's idolized brother and the vaunted history of the Smith family are not what they seem.  Along with the pivotal role played by the enthusiastic Black Dog, rich secondary characters enhance a 1970s-set story that adds much to the discussion of how tragedy and racism affect individuals, families, and whole communities."--The Horn Book
 
 
"Tautly constructed, metaphorically rich, emotionally gripping and seductively told,Schmidt's (The Wednesday Wars) novel opens in the 300-year-old ancestral home of Henry Smith, whose father has raised him to believe that "if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you." With such an opening, it is inevitable that Trouble does find the aristocratic Smiths: Henry's older brother, Franklin, is critically injured by a truck. A Cambodian refugee named Chay, who attends the same school as Franklin, acknowledges responsibility, but over the course of Chay's trial it occurs, to Henry at least, that it was Franklin who sought Trouble: the racism he directed toward Chay specifically and Cambodian immigrants generally has been so widely shared in the community that no one challenged it. Twin sequences of events plunge the Smiths and Chay into further tragedy, also revealing the ravages of Chay's childhood under the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, a storm exposes a charred slave ship long buried on the Smiths' private beach: it emerges that their house has been close to Trouble all along. For all the fine crafting, the novel takes a disturbingly broad-brush approach to racism. Characters are either thuggish or willfully blind or saintly, easily pegged on a moral scale-and therefore untrue to life."--Publishers Weekly
 
"One of children's literature's prose masters presents a typically deliberate tale of moral awakening. Henry Smith, younger son of a well-to-do Massachusetts family, finds his secure world rocked to its foundations when his jogging brother is critically injured by a pickup truck driven by a young Cambodian immigrant. His family falls apart. Three things keep Henry, too, from crumbling completely: his hatred for the boy who drove the truck, his love for the stray Black Dog he brings home and his determination to climb Maine's Mt. Katahdin, the mountain his brother teased him he'd never summit. The leisurely development of plot and characters allows the latter full emotional complexity and nuances the former with the layers of relationships that, willy-nilly, bind humanity together. One subplot too many-the wreck of a slaver appears on the Smiths' beach-results in a little too much Significant Musing and a wild coincidence that threatens the credibility of the whole. It's a measure of Schmidt's control in other realms that this still stands as a deeply moving and pleasurable read."--Kirkus Reviews<

Customer Reviews

Wonderful!5
This is yet another wonderful work from a proven writer. While most people will market it as a book for young adults, a 50-something male like me found it to be a wonderful read. It's a book full of enough twists and turns to keep you turning the pages until you reach its remarkable conclusion. There's more than a fair bit of Trouble here, but also beautiful glimpses of Hope and Glory.

Courtesy of Teens Read Too5
I don't think that there's any way for me to summarize the complex plot that makes up the novel TROUBLE, but I'm going to try.

Henry's father always said that if you stayed far enough away from Trouble, Trouble would never find you. It was what Henry and everyone else in his family believed. Until Trouble came to their lives in the form of Chay, a young Cambodian teen. Henry's older brother, Franklin, had been jogging on the night Chay hit him. Chay said it was an accident but their community thinks otherwise -- because Cambodians don't belong there and are the cause of every disaster.

Filled with anger of the accident, Henry, his best friend, and Black Dog set out to do the one thing Henry and Franklin had planned to do - climb Mt. Katahdin. They don't know how they're going to get there, how they're going to survive, or anything about climbing mountains, but they know they're going to do it.

As their journey continues, Henry runs into the one he hates most. Chay is also running from Trouble, and the once-enemies become allies. Henry begins to realize that family is not always what it seems -- and sometimes you just can't run from Trouble.

All I can say is that this is an amazing book and should be required reading in every classroom. Not only were the characters real and three-dimensional, each with their own quirks and problems, but the plot was also drawn out perfectly, with the right amount of details and action. You could feel yourself being taken into their world and, though this is technically a historical novel, I could barely tell because it seemed so real.

While reading this book, you will feel your heart breaking for Chay but you'll also be hoping that everything turns out okay for Henry's family. TROUBLE will take you on a roller coaster of emotions that you will never forget.

There's really no way for me to explain how much I loved this book. It's creative and original and just all-around amazing. Whether you're a middle school English teacher or a student, you should definitely pick this up on your next trip to the bookstore. Or heck, order it from Amazon today!

Reviewed by: Harmony

Richie's Picks: TROUBLE5
" 'It smells like you have a dog in here,' he said. 'A wet dog.' His voice was tight.
"It did not seem useful to Henry to lie about this.
"Especially since the dog came around the corner of the island and sat down, her head cocked off to the side so that the ear with the large missing piece stuck out.
"Now Henry's father's face grew tight, too.
" 'Get the dog out of here.' he said.
" 'I just saved her from drowning in the cove.'
" 'That was a mistake. You don't go looking for Trouble, Henry...Get away.'
"The last part was directed not at Henry but at the dog, who had come to sniff Henry's father to see if he might be at all interesting.
" 'Get away,' he said again. 'Black dog, get away.'
"The dog lifted up a paw.
"And Henry's father kicked her about as hard as a slippered foot can kick. Enough to skid her across the quarried stone floor.
"She did not cry out. When she stopped skidding, she turned on her back, put her feet up in the air, and showed her belly.
" 'Why did you ever bring that dog in here?' said Henry's father. 'Look at her. Who would want a black dog like that? Lying there, all beat up. Bleeding. Pieces of her missing.' He stopped. He leaned against the kitchen island and put his hands across his eyes. 'Pieces of her missing,' he said again. His body trembled, slowly, and then a little bit more, and a little more, like a building that is beginning to feel the earthquake starting under its foundations.
"Then his mouth opened, and though no sound came out, his silent howls filled the kitchen.
"Henry held his father. Tight. Very tight. He felt the black dog come back to them. He felt his father reach down to scratch behind her chipped ear. He saw the dog roll her face with pleasure against his father's untied robe -- and hoped that his father would not see the pus and blood that she left there.
"They stood, the three of them, together in the kitchen, and two things happened.
"First, Black Dog had a home and a name.
"Second, the telephone rang. It was the hospital."

Set in the 1980s, TROUBLE is the story of Henry Smith, a middle school student growing up on the northern coast of Massachusetts in a large house which has been inhabited by his ancestors for 300 years. Henry's older brother, Franklin, and his sister, Louisa, both attend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Preparatory High School in Blythbury-by-the-Sea, the town that has grown up around their ancestral home. Big brother Franklin is the golden boy, popular and athletic, who can do no wrong -- or at least that is how it seems at first glance.

As he did with THE WEDNESDAY WARS, my favorite children's book of 2007, Gary Schmidt creates an extraordinary work of historical fiction that melds zany humor with unfathomable, brutal history with the intricacies of growing up in a family. As with THE WEDNESDAY WARS, he incorporates classical literature. (In THE WEDNESDAY WARS Holling Hoodhood was dealing with Shakespeare; here Henry is wrestling with Chaucer.) Furthermore, in both books there are adult characters who epitomize prejudice and stupidity in the world. The character in THE WEDNESDAY WARS whom I most hated was Micky Mantle. Here, in TROUBLE, it is Dr. Sheringham, principal of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Prep.

Trouble comes when Franklin is out running one evening and he is struck by a vehicle, causing his loss of an arm and critical brain damage, and requiring that he be maintained in a comatose state. The driver of the vehicle is arrested. We know little about that driver until a pretrial hearing lays out an apparent mystery to be unraveled.

The driver of the vehicle is Chay Chouan. Chay and his parents are survivors of the Cambodian massacres that took place under the Khmer Rouge; Chay has experienced his sister being shot in front of him and his brother being taken by force. Having barely survived, and having made their way out of Cambodia to the United States, Chay's family has settled into Merton, a formerly-abandoned mill town that has been revitalized by an influx of Cambodian refugees. Chay's parents, who have founded a family masonry and stonework business, want the best for Chay. And so it is -- we learn during the pretrial hearing -- that Chay's parents had gotten him enrolled at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Preparatory High School in Blythbury-by-the-Sea, where Chay has been repeatedly beat up and had his property destroyed by a group of students led by golden boy Franklin Smith.

And -- if we hadn't previously gotten the drift -- it becomes abundantly clear that Chay and Louisa (Henry and Franklin's sister) have been spending time together and are in love. One might well conclude that knowledge of this relationship has contributed to Franklin's neanderthal behavior.

It is during the pretrial hearing, when all of this is revealed, that Dr. Sheringham's testimony also makes it crystal clear that the administration has fully sanctioned the abuse meted out upon Chay by Franklin and his cronies.

And so readers are provided this information, along with the fact that Chay claims to have fallen asleep behind the wheel, and that he bandaged Franklin's arm with his shirt before racing off to get medical assistance. (Remember, this is the 1980s. There are no cell phones for calling 911.)

The question is, with knowing the way that Franklin and his henchmen have savagely beaten and abused Chay, might Chay have purposely or unconsciously struck Franklin?

And how might you feel if you'd had a life like Chay's and found yourself behind the wheel in such circumstances?

"In the dark, in the light, always imagining her face, remembering her face in the moments before the accident. Her laugh. Her easy wave. How her wave had been the first thing about her that told him all he needed to know.
"How had his father guessed? 'Remember you were Cambodian before you were American.' And so he had taken his dog to teach him what he had to learn. He beat her. He made him watch. He starved her. He made him watch. 'Learn how to be strong,' he said. Then he took her away. 'She is drowned,' he said when he returned. 'Learn to be cold inside.'
"But this is not what he learned.
"He had not realized how much he had missed her face."

Adding TROUBLE to WEDNESDAY WARS and the Prinz Honor and Newbery Honor book LIZZIE BRIGHT AND THE BUCKMINSTER BOY makes for quite an amazing trifecta for Gary Schmidt.