Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt

I loved, LOVED The Wednesday Wars, which Schmidt wrote first. I'd never heard of it until a few years ago, when a few of the book blogs I follow recommended them. And then I kept hearing about how Okay for Now was just as good and I was so excited to get to it. And yes, it WAS just as good. It was fantastic. The Wednesday Wars uses Shakespeare in this kid's life, and Okay for Now is more about the art of John James Audubon and how art impacts Doug Szwieteck's life (I actually don't know how his name was spelled, since I listened to it, and I'm not going to look it up right now). Doug was a minor character in The Wednesday Wars, but he becomes the narrator and main character of this book. He and his family move away from the original town and move to a small town in upstate New York, and he hates it at first and people assume that he and his brother are "twisted criminal minds" because maybe they are. But he finds a copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America on display at the library and gets sucked into the beauty of the paintings and trying to learn how to draw them. I love how Schmidt paints these stories of kind of unhappy families, but doesn't leave them totally unredeemed--there's a happier ending with a hopeful slant to it, after Doug's brother comes home changed for the better in Vietnam, and after his dad does something that isn't totally terrible for once. I was totally absorbed in this story, and Schmidt is such a great writer who never, ever breaks character or writes something that feels out of place. Even when kind of extraordinary things happen, like Doug getting drafted to act in a Broadway play, it feels totally understandable and believable. I loved this and will definitely be buying a copy for our house.