Walter Meets Mack, Michael Stoesz

http://waltermeetsmack.com/

Michael Stoesz is a teacher and it shows in this children’s book.  It is a story told with a teenage immigrant who flees the oppression of Russia in his native Finland and we follow Walter Myllymäki in his quest to find an uncle in the landscape of shifting jobs – logging, farming, and the low ranking work of early Minneapolis. He is penniless, without an adult to guide him, and only an uncle’s name and Minnesota as his touchstones.

Children will feel for this lost teen and his travails.  It is allegorical in that the teen years tend to be a time when everyone is seeking who they are – the quest for their place in the world and the audience – I would think would be from grades 3 – 6, but teachers will know better than me – and the preteens are always curious about the life of the teens.

Michael brings in a lot of history and his images of early Minneapolis are well done and provide the means by which the reader can imagine what the world was like.  Seen through the eyes of a teenager the confusing world of transients comes to life.

Then the odyssey begins – after finding ways to use his balancing abilities to earn some money he is befriended by an older Finn and he becomes a lumber man in the northern Minnesota forests.  Here we learn about the details of logging, the language, the lifestyle and also the pathos as he sees the stumps and realizes the voracious consumption that is already the hallmark of the nation.

He meets Finnish farmers, befriends a young Irishman and sticks out the logging year thus allowing us to learn about both early farming and the cycles of the logger’s year and the variations that come from the seasons.

Uncle Emil is always a phantom.  He was here, someone met him there, but you keep wondering if he will be successful in finding this illusive relative who seems to be driving Walter’s life through his absence.

I enjoyed the richness of the descriptions and the subtexts that are incorporated in.  There are lessons in ecology and even geology as well as the presence of a bully and the need to deal with him. 

I recommend the book and teachers and homeschoolers will like the extra ideas on the website.