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Tracks(Ages 14 up)—Houghton, 1986 The powerful evocative story of an 11-year-old who journeys with his older brother through the Dust Bowl of Texas and Oklahoma during the Depression... through harrowing poverty, dust storms, and a blood curdling encounter with the Ku Klux Klan... Love, loyalty and Blue’s unsullied vision transcend the harsh surroundings... Characterization is vivid, structure superb. Will be popular for its action, but it deserves recognition for its excellent craftsmanship and the beauty of its voice. Kirkus Reviews ...a glorious adventure as the boys learn to survive in the speeding trains and the hobo jungles along the tracks. ...Blue and Monroe are wonderfully drawn, their relationship close, funny, and caring—Monroe always in love with some girl; Blue, a sharp observer... The story is told in colorful Oklahoma dialect... with sharp vignettes of the period... exciting action, strong relationships, and vivid historical detail shot throughout with cruelty, prejudice, humor, and brotherhood. Booklist Unanimously named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, Tracks was also placed on the Sequoyah Young Adult Book Masterlist by the Oklahoma Library Association and on the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Masterlist. The handsome book jacket for Tracks was created by Darryl Zudeck. I was told by my editor at Houghton Mifflin that when Darryl brought it into the office, the staff there gasped. I myself uttered an “ahhh!” when I opened the package with my ten gratis author’s copies. I have only one tiny regret about it. I would like Blue's older brother, Monroe Monroe Monroe, to be more prominent in the train doorway. The book is a picaresque romance with Blue worshipping Monroe and Monroe madly in love with every girl they meet along the way. This jacket looks too much like a younger kid’s book. Tracks received a unanimous vote as an American Library Association’s Best Book for Young Adults. Many of my characters reappear in my other books or plays at different ages. Monroe and the entire Starr Family reappear in On Daddy’s Birthday. Photos of Monroe and the Starr girls in 1934 Oklahoma, and of the women the girls were to become in 1984 Hollywood, along with their brute of a father in the stage play On Daddy’s Birthday. A lot of the adventures in Tracks came from my childhood memories of my dad's telling his stories of hopping freights from Oklahoma to California and back in 1934. When I knew that I wanted to put those stories into a novel, I interviewed my dad, with my mom in the room, too, because of course she would want to have her own input into those memories, and I came up with nearly ten hours of cassette recordings. One of those cassettes yielded gold when my dad broke down crying when he remembered one particular instance of a kindness done to him by a woman along his way. My mom suggested that I turn off the recorder until my dad could regain control, and I bent down and pretended to do so. But I knew richness when I found it, and I left the recorder running. Now almost thirty years later I have finally found a way to convert those old cassettes to CD, and I offer here on this webpage this very moving few minutes of my dad's memories. Listen to Clayton, Bess, and Bob Locke where Dad cries during their interview. (9 minutes) Read about and listen to eight minutes, three hymns, of the tape recording that my sweet mom and aunties made at my grandma's death bed, singing hymns remembered from their childhood to carry Grandma to her "home on God's celestial shore." This 30-minute recording obsessed me for weeks and was what eventually inspired me to write On Daddy’s Birthday. But I was wise enough NOT to invite my mom and dad to come and see this play; it would have appeared to them a desecration of the sweetness of these aged sisters singing their mother into Heaven.
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