Up, up and away!
A listair and Eleanor Brocket considered themselves perfectly normal, and wanted nothing more than to live a normal life, raising normal children and drawing absolutely no attention to themselves. Some might have called that boring, but Mr. and Mrs. Brocket who, it turns out, had far from boring parents themselves, called it bliss.
And all was well until their third child, Barnaby, was born. Not only was the birth different (Mrs. Brocket uttered sounds she had never uttered when Henry and Melanie were born), but so was the baby. Oh, he had two arms and two legs and 10 fingers and 10 toes — all the usual parts — but he floated. The baby floated!
“Your brother’s a little different from the rest of us,” Alistair Brocket told his kids when baby Barnaby was brought home f rom hospital three days later. “Does he have two heads?” Henry asked. “Does he have a tail?” his sister wanted to know. Their father sighed deeply when he answered no, telling them they had extraordinary imaginations. “I don’t know where you get them from. Neither your mother nor I have any imagination at all, and we certainly didn’t bring you up to have one.”
Luckily, author John Boyne is blessed with a vivid imagination — as is illustrator Oliver Jeffers — and the two of them have created a lively novel for middle-graders that not only tells a good story, but raises some interesting questions as well. And while children’s books today don’t set out to preach morals or teach lessons the way books of old did, this one delivers a pretty important message: Namely, that there’s nothing wrong with standing out from the crowd.
Mr. and Mrs. Brocket, unfortunately, never quite absorb that message. As a result, Barnaby’s life is far from easy and by the time he’s in school, a backpack filled with sandbags is the preferred method of keeping him grounded — until he is eight, and the terrible thing referred to in the title happens.
It causes Barnaby to float away from his home in Sydney, Australia, and embark on a voyage that brings him into contact with all manner of unique individuals — each more tolerant and accepting than his parents. Except, of course, the unscrupulous circus freak-show promoter who catches Barnaby in Toronto as he floats up the CN Tower, adding him to his stable of captives.
The group is eventually rescued and Barnaby makes his way back to Sydney, where he is welcomed by joyful siblings, but not so by a mother and father who are happy only when they hear surgery can fix an imbalance in their son’s ear that will keep him earthbound.
Barnaby, however, has had a taste of adventure and discovered that he likes being different. So he makes a decision that will leave some readers cheering, while others may feel unsettled.