![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/Watsons-image.jpeg\" "\\"Watsons")
<\/a><\/p>\nI belong to a \u201cYoung Adult\u201d book club here in Vancouver. No \u2013 I\u2019m not trying to pass myself off as a young adult. The club is made up of writers who craft young adult novels. We meet four times during the year, generally choosing a couple of books to discuss at each meeting. Our fall meeting is always in September, and getting together last week, we looked at two novels in which humour was a dominant element: The Watsons Go To Birmingham \u2013 1963<\/em> by Christopher Paul Curtis and The Teacher\u2019s Funeral: A Comedy in Three Acts<\/em> by Richard Peck. We had been reading some pretty heavy teenage problem novels for our previous meeting \u2013 so these were chosen as a counterpoint (and we were all happy to read something lighter over the summer).<\/p>\n I had rather guiltily suggested The Watsons<\/em> to the group because I suspected it might be actually for a younger audience than adolescent readers. But it was a novel I\u2019d somehow missed reading over the 16 years since its publication \u2013 and was still longing to read \u2013 so I thought I might sneak it in under the wire. One of the points that came up in discussion was that, while the narrator is a precocious ten-year-old, the book emerges as a story that is particularly focused on the character of his older brother, Byron, who is thirteen. It may even be more Byron\u2019s story than Kenny\u2019s story. Certainly this is a book I wouldn\u2019t have hesitated to share with junior high classes when I was teaching \u2013 and, really, it is a book for all ages.<\/p>\n The Watsons are an African-American family living in Flint, Michigan, in 1963. Kenny\u2019s dad has grown up there, but his mother is from Alabama, and \u2013 during the bitterly cold days of a Northern winter — she mourns the warm South. When it appears that Byron is determinedly practicing-up to become a juvenile delinquent, Mom and Dad decide to park the teen with his grandmother in Birmingham for a year and see if he can get himself turned around, and so the family piles into their 1948 Plymouth (dubbed\u00a0 the \u201cBrown Bomber\u201d) for a marathon trip to Grandma\u2019s (with no stop-overs).<\/p>\n Curtis is in his element searching out the humour of situations (as Byron manages to get his lips stuck to the car\u2019s sideview mirror in the dead of winter and is caught by Mom playing war games with burning toilet-paper parachutes \u2013 to mention a couple). And he plays with dialogue in a way that reminded me of Bill Cosby\u2019s early recordings. So funny. I love the way that Mom\u2019s southern accent thickens as she becomes excited or angry.<\/p>\n And now the amazing part: the narrative, so filled with the laughter and warmth of this family, segues into a confrontation with that different world of prejudice and murder that swirls through the South as the Civil Rights movement gains momentum in the early \u201860\u2019s. Somehow Curtis accomplishes this about-turn seamlessly. There is an element of magic in Kenny\u2019s little sister Joey escaping the carnage of the bombing of a church in which she was attending Sunday School along with the four little girls who were killed. But the real magic is how this tragedy pulls the Watsons toward a new perspective on their family ties.<\/p>\n