The best books with coming-of-age characters teaming up to face the unknown

This novel does a good job showing the difficulty small children have knowing just how to see the world while learning right from wrong, and how, if given emotional room to grow, they most often gain a sense of self that allows their essential goodness to emerge. As a child, I identified with the children depicted in part because I am a child of the American South, raised in a part of the country where being an eccentric is tolerated, even valued, unless and until a scapegoat is needed. The story gives me a nostalgia for a time when historical injustices in the South were beginning to be addressed, rather than denied, as they so often are today.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is for me about personal perspective and how our own shame and regret can darken our experience of the world and leave us emotionally vulnerable in our striving to reach our hearts’ desire. As an alcoholic, I did a lot of stupid things while intoxicated and trying to reach my heart’s desire, which was to be a successful illustrator. As a sober alcoholic now, I recognize a lot of that intoxicated striving in certain characters in the novel, especially, Jim Nightshade, Mr. Tetley, Mr. Crosetti, and Miss Foley, while the sobering influence of Will Holloway and the redemptive love of Charles Holloway work their own magic against that of the evil carnival.

Even the tiniest things mean something. As a nearsighted child, I tended to examine my surroundings up close, filling nooks and crannies with stories. Reading The Goldfinch was a bit like experiencing a story from my own nearsighted point of view. At the story’s heart, we find the painting of the same name, by Carel Fabritius. The tiny chain around the leg of the bird isn’t noticed at first, but once seen changes everything for the viewer. Tartt tells a large tale while concentrating on the smallest elements. In an instant of time, the life of the small boy in the story is changed forever. Thereafter, each of his decisions, even the seemingly insignificant ones carry consequences that take him on a long journey through darkness to redemption.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane speaks to me about my need to reclaim in adulthood some of the magic from my childhood. It’s told from the perspective of an adult character, a broken man, never named, looking back on his childhood. Memories come back upon returning to his childhood home. While realizing some hard truths about his upbringing, he also remembers the real magic he experienced with a childhood friend. Recalling that the pond in his rural neighborhood had the actual ability to become an ocean, he learns that hard truths and magic are not mutually exclusive, and that dangers lurk in both. Child and man become one.

The Body is Gordie’s odyssey into imagination. As we would be inclined to do, he wants to see the dead boy out of morbid curiosity. He also wants to be the hero who found the body. The odyssey tests and reveals Gordie’s character and that of his three friends. As with the boys, we bear some lonely disappointments and pains. We’d be going to see the dead body merely so we could think to ourselves, at least that’s not me. Perhaps that’s what motivates them too. Who doesn’t do that? Yet their quest doesn’t lead only to an unknown dead boy, but to the dead boy in all of them, perhaps all of us. They are brought together as one by the experience and win the prize—they are alive.