Review: The Vacation by Polly Horvath

NOTE: This is a review I wrote a several months ago about a young adult book, The Vacation by Polly Horvath. This review may contain spoilers.
 
Twelve-year-old Henry's mother decides to become a Mormon missionary in Africa (despite the fact that she is not Mormon) and drags Henry's long-suffering, maxim-spouting father along for the ride. They leave Henry behind with is two aunts, Pigg and Magnolia, who are not terribly fond of children and who decide to pull Henry out of school and take him along with them on a cross-country road trip. While they are gone, they learn that Henry's mother has become lost in the jungle after chasing after monkeys and his father has contracted malaria while searching for her. For his part, Henry spends several days floating with an autistic boy through alligator-infested swamps in Florida while his aunts (and even the Green Berets!) frantically search for him.

Obviously these events sound, and are, completely far-fetched, but Henry is such a realistic and endearing protagonist that what really matters is not so much the lack of realism of his and his family's adventures, but his reactions to them and his astute observations about the characters they meet. And how could you not love a kid who doesn't mind going anywhere as long as he has a big pile books? In one of my favorite scenes, Pigg and Magnolia take Henry to a bookstore in a mall to buy him some books and tell him to "buy some books that are thick and engrossing.... And cheap." Here's another passage that made me laugh out loud. The family has just stopped at a farm house in Kansas, and the farmer is telling them a story about a neighbor lady, Mrs. Grady, who wouldn't stop feeding their horse inappropriate foods, such as spaghetti and french fries:

"So the next day we see her car pull up on the way to work, same as always, and we see her drop something from a bucket onto the ground and the horse is eating it, so we go over to have a look-see and it weren't spaghetti, were it, Jim?"

"Well, what were, uh, was it?" asked my mother, who was getting into the story big time, I could tell.

"It was french fries," said Jim.

"Now, can a horse eat those?" asked my mom.

"No, Katherine, they sure can't," said Bud. "You're right on the mark about that. They sure can't. And the thing of it was, I thought Mrs. Grady could kind of extrapolate, you know. About the spaghetti. Figuring like, no spaghetti, then no french fries either."

"But it seemed like she could not," said Jim.

"So it seemed. Wasn't much for extrapolation," said Bud.

I'm also going to quote the book's final two paragraphs here, just because I can identify so deeply with the simple pleasures of those long, warm, lazy Midwestern summer days:

Nobody said anything. We were still glowing from the unexpected baseball, from the long perfect day and all that ice cream. There was a dreamy twilight haze as the sun lowered toward the cornfields, as if the air had trapped the light and thickened with it. There was nothing making noise for miles but the peaceful buzz of crickets and the sound of our car parting the stillness. I don't know. I don't know. How can you not love it all?

And then we drove endlessly, endlessly over the gentle crests. A sign said: Welcome to Iowa.

I highly recommend this book!