Review: Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger

If you ask me, I will tell you that I am more than a little tired of books set around World War II. I will also tell you that baseball bores me silly. And yet somehow, I picked up Steve Kluger's Last Days of Summer this summer (I've had it untouched long enough that I discovered Borders bookmarks in the front) and thoroughly enjoyed this warm, delightful, hilarious, and ultimately heartbreaking epistolary novel.

It's 1940, and twelve-year-old Joey Margolis lives in Brooklyn with his mother and his aunt, his father having remarried and abandoned his son. Joey is the only Jewish kid on the block and he's bullied pretty badly so he and his best friend Craig Nakamura cook up a way to get the bullies off Joey's (and Craig's) back. Joey sstarts writing to Charlie Banks, an up-and-coming star third baseman, albeit a hot-headed one, on the New York Giants asking him to hit a home run for Joey. But Joey doesn't just ask for the home run, he claims to be dying of every malady under the sun as each of his letters to Banks only gets him a signed photo of the slugger rather than a radio broadcast home run dedication. Finally Charlie snaps and writes back telling Joey to cut it out with the letters. And somehow thus is born one of the most entertaining letter-writing relationships ever. Joey is precocious and highly amusing (and smart and Machiavellian) and no adult who comes into his orbit can resist him for long, not President Roosevelt's press secretary, not Charlie's teammate Stuke, not Charlie's singer girlfriend Hazel, not the rabbi in charge of Joey's Bar Mitzvah, not even his principal (although he might give his teacher a nervous breakdown). The letters that Joey sends and receives are priceless and his correspondence gives the reader a close look at what a boy his age was thinking and worrying about in the run up to WWII. In addition to hounding Charlie, he watches and interprets the situation in Europe writing to advise the president based on his deductions, and he and Craig keep eyes on their elderly German neighbor, convinced she's a spy.

All of the characters here are written convincingly and the reader will be as taken in by Joey's charm as all the other characters are. The news clippings score cards, school papers, and other ephemera included in and amongst the letters add to the period detail. Kluger includes difficult subjects here, such as the Japanese internment camps and Hitler's unchecked military advances in Europe, with a light touch but doesn't minimize them. And while the reader can see the ending coming many pages before it actually arrives, the book has to end that way. This is a book of both laughter and tears, each completely earned. You'll be touched by both Joey and Charlie and will continue to giggle when you think of them and their relationship long after you close the cover.