Some friendships are forever, while others prove more circumscribed.
But as the two work, and talk about their families (all of Hazel's children have moved far away), and do homework and read, their relationship briefly turns into something more valuable: true friendship.
Then, with the permission of Rusty's father, Hazel offers the boy a part-time job helping her with some light maintenance about the house. But when Rusty next bumps into unconventional Hazel after his best friend has just left for summer camp, and she apologizes and invites him over for lunch, he, surprisingly, accepts there is "something at once funny, serious, and sad about her that kept me from turning and leaving," he explains, as much to himself as to the reader (29).
Rusty only knows the woman, Hazel, in that way you know someone from seeing them around your neighborhood, and from what other people you know say about them-in Hazel's case, she's the funny old lady with the tiny garage who sells her seascapes to tourists when she's not zipping about town, hanging her shopping from the arm of her wheelchair. But even his love for his boat becomes fraught when an elderly woman in a wheelchair starts badgering Rusty to take her out for a sail. The only thing that allows Rusty to escape his worries is working on the run-down small sailboat given to him by a sympathetic neighbor ("In my boat there are always things like this that I can do, things I can fix, things I can take care of-unlike some of the other things that I couldn't do anything about ). Rusty, the book's first person narrator, is having a difficult summer: not only is he stuck every morning in summer school, trying to wrangle a passing math grade so he can start sixth grade with the rest of his class, but he's also having to navigate family tensions over his missing mom, who has been sent to a "place for healing" far away from their New England island home (the adult reader recognizes that mom is struggling with major depression). Content warnings: parental mental illness death (not parental)Īdvance reading copy provided by the author/publisherĪn elegant, elegiac celebration of a short but deeply meaningful relationship between two people who happen to be in just the right place at just the right moment when each desperately needs a friend.
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