I am very torn about what rating to give this book. The story is about a young boy, Jim, who is being raised by a single mother and her three brothers during the depression era in the South. On one hand, it is very well written. Earley has a masterful and evocative writing style. You can picture everything he describes, and his writing is very fresh. He just brings the story of Jim to life in a beautiful way. There is nothing about the story that is forced or contrived. It's a simple tale, and you can finish this book in a day or two (I know because I did, and I'm not an especially fast reader).

So why not five stars? Or at least four?

Well, I just felt like the story was a little too simple for my taste. It is a tale you could easily read aloud to a child. It could end up being a classic, but it really seems more like a series of short stories about Jim's life, and somehow the plotting was just too simple to really make me say "Wow!" at the end. The narrative does move along at a nice pace, but at the end, I just sort felt like, "oh, that was a lovely little tale.". And "a lovely little tale" just doesn't make me want to give it 5 stars.

This book is not one I'd choose, but my face to face book club is reading it as part of All Rochester Reads, where the whole town reads the same book. I just prefer more complexity to my books and characters. Jim is well developed, but no one else really is. It really just seemed like a platform to show how well Earley can evoke images without using a single stale word. Good for him! Now, if he'd just take it to another level plot wise, I'd think he was truly a masterful genius. ( )

A lovely sweet story about a boy. Jim Glass is five when the story begins and 11 at the end. We learn early in the book, on the first page, that Jim Glass Sr. has died suddenly at the age of 23. A week later Jim the boy is born. Jim lives with his widowed mother and her three brothers. Jim lives with four adults who love and care for him. The three bachelor uncles are afraid that they are not enough, that Jim needs a father. But the reader see that three loving uncles are more than equal to one living father. Jim learns about life, friendship and more . Jim lives in a tiny community in North Carolina during the 1930s depression. It seems a very limited place but Jim meets a variety of people including the mountain kids who start attending school with the town kids when schools are consolidated in his 4th grade year and the black hired hands who he works along with on the family farm. Jim the Boy is a quiet simple book but there is a lot more too it and it comes highly recommended by me. ( )

A collection of stories in the life of a 10-year-old boy growing up in rural 1934 North Carolina. While the stories are fun, they stay rather at the surface, with only the occasional hint of what complexities surround the boy. ( )

Not quite as good as it's sequel, but very accomplished nonetheless. ( )

A year in the life of a 10 year old boy during The Depression, the perfect mixture of innocence and coming-of-age; a delicate balance of light and dark. Understated but beautiful. Lots of great metaphor. Earley has a way with words that looks and feels simple but that mastery is precisely what had me rereading sentences throughout the book.

I especially loved Book II: Jim Leaves Home: The Wide Sea where buzzards grab the air with their wings, climbing the sky; fish vanish as if made of light; and Jim with feet in the ocean for the first time, trying to feel Belgium, instead feels the water writing strange words on his feet.
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