Following My Own Footsteps - Hardcover

Hahn, Mary Downing

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395764777 ISBN 13: 9780395764770

Publisher: Clarion Books, 1996

Synopsis

When his abusive father is arrested, young bully Gordy Smith is taken to live with his strict grandmother in Virginia, where he learns to respect his grandmother, befriends a boy with polio, and confronts his feelings about his father.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Downing Hahn, a former children’s librarian, is the award-winning author of many popular ghost stories, including Deep and Dark and Dangerous and The Old Willis Place. An avid reader, traveler, and all-around arts lover, Ms. Hahn lives in Columbia, Maryland, with her two cats, Oscar and Rufus.

From School Library Journal

Grade 4-6-Sixth-grader Gordy Smith flees College Park, MD, with his mother and younger siblings to escape an abusive, alcoholic father, seeking refuge with his affluent maternal grandmother in Grandville, NC. Always an outsider, the boy protects himself from rejection with a veneer of insolence and pugnacity, bragging about his brother Donny who is fighting the Nazis in Germany. He jeopardizes his only friendship when he tries a dangerous experiment to get the boy, a fatherless polio victim, to walk. Donny's return from the war brings further disillusionment when the young man shares his horrible experiences and falls short of Gordy's expectations of a conquering hero. When their father arrives to reclaim his family, Gordy refuses to fall back into the old pattern of violence, choosing instead the uncertain security of remaining with his grandmother. The story is absorbing and, for the most part, believable, and details of the period are accurate. But Gordy's first-person narrative renders characterization incomplete, and readers are left with some stereotypes, particularly of the boy's parents. The writing is uneven, and particularly jarring is the repetition of the phrase "the old man" (as Gordy calls his father) as often as seven times on one page. References to Gordy's brother Stu raise questions that are unresolved here. Readers of Hahn's Stepping on the Cracks (Clarion, 1991), a companion to this book, do know Stu's fate, however, and will be interested in Gordy's story despite its flaws.
Marie Orlando, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarion Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0395764777
• ISBN 13: 9780395764770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 186