Want to laugh? Want to cry? Don’t want to be bored by a book? Here you go:
It’s the first day of school and Hercules Beal and friends are walking into the classroom of Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Hupfer. Herc is in a place of surviving each day of living with his older brother since that day a year and a half ago when their parents died in a car accident. Life has handed him a big one. He’s about to get handed twelve more big ones. LTC (Ret.) Hupfer has sized up his new students and in conjunction with reading Edith Hamilton’s MYTHOLOGY each student is assigned a special project. We aren’t making the dioramas here.
Hercules Beal is assigned to read each one of the Twelve Labors of Hercules, to reenact each labor in his own world, and then to write a 150 word summary of what he has learned about the task the original Hercules had to take on.
This book will grab your heart as you go along each morning with Herc and his dog to walk out to the sand dunes of Cape Cod before dawn, sit down and wait and as the sun spreads its first glow. Then, you hear Herc say, “Good morning, Mom. Good morning, Dad,” we head back home to get ready for school, get ready to help his older brother run their family plant nursery which requires a fair amount of back breaking work, and get ready to face life without his mom and dad.
Can Herc really find a way in his own life to redo the Twelve Labors of Hercules? What does that look like?
Get ready to pretty much get some answers to some questions you didn’t know you were asking the world. Get ready to get blindsided by some laugh out loud humor.
Get ready to fall in love - okay at least in like - with a bunch of wily characters.
Deeply written to be deeply felt by our Champion readers and at the same time a gift to our Jokesters who will be entertained by the pop and circumstances. (Could not resist that one.)
Teamplayers will invest in the characters and Investigators will watch to find and analyze the best ways to deal with what life throws at us.
Gary D. Schmidt knows a thing or three about grief and kids. Thank goodness he is given to sitting down and writing 500 words a day for our kids who need to keep company for a few hours with his gentle, caring, hilarious, soul
Recommended by: Barb Langridge, bookandahug.com
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From award-winning author Gary D. Schmidt, a warm and witty novel in the tradition of The Wednesday Wars, in which a seventh grader has to figure out how to fulfill an assignment to perform the Twelve Labors of Hercules in real life—and makes discoveries about friendship, community, and himself along the way.
Herc Beal knows who he's named after—a mythical hero—but he's no superhero. He's the smallest kid in his class. So when his homeroom teacher at his new middle school gives him the assignment of duplicating the mythical Hercules's amazing feats in real life, he's skeptical. After all, there are no Nemean Lions on Cape Cod—and not a single Hydra in sight.
Missing his parents terribly and wishing his older brother wasn't working all the time, Herc figures out how to take his first steps along the road that the great Hercules himself once walked. Soon, new friends, human and animal, are helping him. And though his mythical role model performed his twelve labors by himself, Herc begins to see that he may not have to go it alone.---from the publisher
352 pages 978-0358659631 Ages 9-13
Keywords: middle school, school project, self image, self reliance, finding yourself, friendship, community, 8 year old, 9 year old, 10 year old, 11 year old, 12 year old
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“Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people”
– Lennon/McCartney “Eleanor Rigby (1966)
“‘And so to the classically named Hercules Beal,’ he said, walking over to me. ‘I think your assignment is almost predestined. You will remember that earlier this week I referenced the twelve Labors of the famed Hercules?’
I nodded.
‘You will consider each of those twelve Labors as they might be performed today. In your one-hundred-and-fifty-word reflections, you will then report on your performance of these Labors, or your recognition of the relevance of these Labors during some event you have experienced, chronicling your growing awareness of the meaning of the stories and how they connect to your life.’
‘What do you mean, performance?’ I said.
‘Exactly what the word means: an act in which you perform, do, make, happen, execute, accomplish.’
‘And “recognition of the relevance”?’
‘The strangeness of these myths is how often they subtly enact themselves in our lives. But we notice them only when we’re watching closely–as I hope you will be, because with watching will come recognition, and with recognition, understanding of their relevance. I think you might want to consult Anthon’s Classical Dictionary to begin with. You will find a copy in the Truro Public Library.’
‘Wait a minute. All twelve?’
‘All twelve.’
‘Isn’t one of those Labors going down to hell?’
‘There and back,’ said Lieutenant Colonel Hupfer. ‘As I indicated to Ms. de la Peña, it’s a rough world, Beal.’
A moment passed, almost as if Lieutenant Colonel Hupfer had to think about something, and then he did the strangest thing he’d done since the moment I’d walked into the Cape Cod Academy for Environmental Sciences and Room 117. He leaned down over me and whispered, so quietly that no one else could hear, ‘But I think you already know that.’
I looked at him.
‘Not that I care,’ said Lieutenant Colonel Hupfer.’”
Sh-t happens. It always has, always does, and always will. The Ancients made up stories, in part, to try to make sense of why sh-t happens and to comfort the victims and the next-of-kin survivors of that sh-t. Tales told to explain the inexplicable.
Five decades ago, as a business major at UConn, hanging out with a girlfriend who was an agriculture major, I enrolled for fun in an agricultural merchandising class. I have fond memories of that down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts introduction to planning and operating a small business. Those memories had me feeling right at home reading THE LABORS OF HERCULES BEAL. It's the story of seventh grader Hercules Beal–the smallest kid in his grade–who has grown up on Cape Cod immersed in a long-established family nursery business.
But last year, sh-t happened. Hercules’s parents died in an automobile accident. Now Hercules is living on the family farm with his older brother Achilles, who gave up his own dreams in order to move back to Cape Cod, take over responsibility for the family business, and become Hercules’s guardian. THE LABORS OF HERCULES BEAL spans that seventh-grade school year, a year in which Hercules must work in the Beal Brothers Farm and Nursery pretty much every moment that he is not in school, doing homework, or sleeping.
Along the way, Hercules adopts a dog and a cat, who are charming, memorable and occasionally larger-than-life characters. The pair follow him each morning as Hercules treks to a sand dune above the sea and bids his dead parents good morning as the sun rises.
“Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest”
– Paul Simon (1970)
As I’ve come to expect from Gary Schmidt’s tales, readers are immersed in some great classic literature and contemporary culture. Per usual, there is also a healthy measure of humor.
THE LABORS OF HERCULES BEAL gets me right there in large part because the teacher who is so challenging for Hercules at the beginning of the story, and will turn out to not be such a jerkface after all, is none other than Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Hupfer. Yup. Danny Hupfer who, like me, was a seventh grader on Long Island during the 1967-68 school year. Danny Hupfer, who experienced Mrs. Baker in seventh grade, and who is now a no-nonsense, retired Marine.
(Yes, there is one brief mention of Holling, one of the many times I kind of lost it while reading this one. And if you don’t know what I’m referring to, immediately go read or reread Schmidt’s Newbery Honor book THE WEDNESDAY WARS, one of my all-time favs, and the first of what are now four related books.)
For book number four, Gary Schmidt has written a first-rate coming-of-age story, a moving, memorable tale that, like the ancient Greeks, entertains and consoles as it leads audiences to try to make sense of the sh-t that us mortals have been forced to face since time immemorial. It’s also a story of community, of lending a helping hand, and of recognizing something bigger than just making a buck or scoring a point or a new gadget. With this fourth book, I’m now viewing it as a series/cycle to recommend, like I did a generation ago with Cynthia Voigt’s HOMECOMING series (which happened to begin on Cape Cod).
Recommended by: Richie Partington, MLIS, California USA
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