A few years ago Kathryn Erskine’s Mockingbird won the National Book Award for children’s literature. The Absolute Value of Mike, her latest book, is a story that will have special appeal to young teens who have “gifted” parents, those who are growing up in households where the achievements of one or more parent are exceptional and a child often suffers under the parental and social expectation that they too will grow up to be high achievers and extraordinarily successful adults. Such is the problem faced by our story’s hero, fourteen-year- old Mike Einstein Foster (no pressure when they give you a name like that!). Mike’s mother died when he was very young, and he has been his father’s caretaker, handling the mundane and practical matters of running thier household for many years. Mike’s father is an abstracted and eccentric engineering genius, brilliant at the math skills so necessary for his career; Mike suffers from a condition known as “dyscalculia,” a brain disorder which causes a person to have great difficulty in manipulating numbers. But that hasn’t stopped his father from assuming that his son will follow in his footsteps and have a brilliant career in engineering…..whether he wants to or not.
One fateful summer, Mike’s father takes a temporary teaching job in Eastern Europe and sends Mike to spend the summer with his great aunt and uncle in rural Donover, Pennsylvannia. His father believes that his uncle is working on an engineering project in which Mike, as his assistant, will get some practical experience in the applications of science. When Mike arrives, it turns out that there has been a big misunderstanding. The project in which the whole town of Donover is engaged is raising $40,000 so that one of its local citizens can adopt an orphan from Romania. Mike ends up managing the entire campaign to raise the money. In the process he comes to understand what are his own special abilities and talents, that he can inspire and bring people together to solve a “human” engineering problem. It’s the very sort of skill set that his father lacks and values so little.
That’s the serious gist of the story, but the tale is enlivened with humor and a cast of very eccentric folks we meet in the town of Donover. As his Aunt Moo tells him, “some of us are more extreme cases than others,” but Donover seems to have more than its fair share. They all seem to be stuck in some sorrow that makes it difficult for them to move on and face the matter at hand and bring about the good that might be done. It is hard for Mike to relinquish his initial impatience with these characters in what seems to him their wallowing in sorrow and their diminished ability to face the world. But his great accomplishment is to finally understand and sympathize with these odd and kind people he comes to know. What he learns that summer is a way to lead them forward from the losses that bind them. The strength of this self-discovery allows him to confront his father and assert his right to make his own choices for his life.
As the son of an engineer who flunked high school Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, I got this story. Or it found me, and will find some others yet I suppose.
