I truly loved this book and highly recommend it. Navigating Early is an adventure book set at the end of WWII in the Maine wilderness. Jack suddenly is uprooted from his Kansas home after his mother’s death and placed in a boarding school in Maine. There he meets Early Auden, who today would be identified as having autism, but then was just considered different. Early, who refuses to believe his brother Fisher has been killed in the war, reads the number pi as a story and collects clippings about sightings of a great black bear on the Appalachian Trail. When the boys find themselves alone during school break, they head out on a quest to find the bear. The events that occur and the characters they meet, all figure into the Pi story Early tells as they travel. Jack and Early encounter “pirates, a volcano, a great white-whale, a hundred-year-old woman, a lost hero, a huge bear, and a timber rattler” as they navigate their way through the woods and their lives which had so unexpectedly been changed.
Loaded with
rich characters and vivid language, Navigating
Early pulls you in at a slow pace to a breath-taking finish. Middle grade
readers through one-hundred-year olds would enjoy this book. It’s a winner!
by Hunter, seventh-grade reader
AR Level: 5.2
AR Points: 11
