FFB: I'm Owen Harrison Harding -- James Whitfield Ellison

Now and then I read a book that I think is truly forgotten.  I think that while I'm reading it, that I'm the only person in the world who's reading it.  Such a book is I'm Owen Harrison Harding by James Whitfield Ellison.  It was published in 1957, and as the cover makes it clear, the publisher was hoping to get some of the audience that The Catcher in the Rye appealed to.  I don't know if the ploy worked, but the two books do have certain similarities.  Owen is 16 and trying to figure out life.  His first person narration is a little like Holden Caulfield's.  That's about it, though.

The setting of the novel is a long way from Pencey Prep and New York city.  The whole book takes place in Fleming (standing in for Lansing), Michigan, and it covers a lot more time than Catcher, a full school year and most of a summer.  The situations that Owen finds himself in are different from those Holden has to deal with.  Owen's mother is dying, and his father has a serious drinking problem.  His brother's in the army, serving in the Pacific Theater.  (The time period covers the last year or so of WWII.)  Owen has several friends, and he hangs out with them a lot.  He develops an interest in a girl who's two years older than he is.

I found a lot to like in this book, but then I'm a sucker for a coming-of-age story.  Owen's father owns a bookstore, but there's only one extended scene there.  It's so well done that I wished for more.  My favorite part of it is that one of Owen's pals always slips into the back of the store to read Jack Woodford books.  Some of you can appreciate the joke.  And the concluding chapter of the novel, set on the day and the night when the end of the war is announced was great.  I liked it so much that I'm going to read it again.  It's a great picture of a long-lost time when feelings were very different.  But then it was a very different world.

The author, James Whitfield Ellison, might be unknown to most of us, but he had a long career in both fiction and nonfiction.  He was still active, or at least was until recently, doing novelizations of movies like Akeela and the Bee and The Panic Room.