The Book of Charlie: Spirit of the Pompey Hollow Book Club

by Jerome Mark Antil

Overview

Selected as one of two best novels for the year - 5 Star Review. Author of this series is being compared to Mark Twain. It's a coming of age story beginning with a summer vacation, climaxing on a full moonlit Halloween night. They're teens now - and their club president, Mary Crane, decides to follow her teacher's suggestion of getting a Pen Pal for the summer. She writes to a boy her mother had read about in the newspaper - a Pennsylvania lad. He writes back. As the summer unfolds one of the teens is witness to a crime in progress. Innocently the young Pen Pal to the club's president unwittingly helps them not only solve the mystery of just who the crooks are but they also solve what turns out to be an unresolved military mystery dating back to the War and still lingering in the shadows of the D-Day invasion. Was it coincidence that Mary's Pen Pal just happens to be a grandson of the president of the United States? It's more than a Halloween story, it's a history book. It might be to today's chronicles of the past what Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was in 1884. With a backdrop of rural life and times as they were in 1953 this novel reawakens our faded memory and colorfully illustrates two vanishing landmarks, both epics of an American culture and world history. The family farm for one and sad as it may be, the fleeting memories of the pivotal D-Day Invasion under Supreme Commander General Dwight David Eisenhower - the other. Without either we could have lost the War. This novel brings them both back to life in absorbing detail - it's a fable with a solid footing of the times for the tale's lasting cultural relevance. It all happened amidst five country towns, a few villages and hamlets where more than sixty five family farms were busy raising children, apples, corn, and wheat, and - all told - milking about 3,200 cows.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780989304436
Publisher:	Little York Books
Publication date:	03/27/2014
Series:	Pompey Hollow Book Club , #2
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jerome Mark Antil is the seventh child of a seventh son - of a seventh son. Born at sunrise it's been said by Mary Holman Antil and Michael C. Antil Sr., that he was the first of eight siblings to stay alert all day and sleep all night from the moment he was born.
"I can remember the Pearl Harbor attack announced on the Zenith floor-model radio before I could walk. I'd listen to Edward R. Murrow reporting the War from London...the scratchy battle weary ship-to-shore Morse code telegraphed messages while my diaper was being changed".
Heartfelt, light-hearted fare of family and friendship nostalgia in the 1940s and 1950s are his favorite subjects. He revels at capturing in good detail what it was like being a kid living in a world at War. As the War ended, he grew up in Delphi Falls, which provided the setting for The Pompey Hollow Book Club and The Book of Charlie.
"My dad was a baker from the 1929 Great Depression through the post-War 1950s. As a young boy, I'd ride with him all throughout central and northern New York visiting grocers and U.S. Army bases; baseball parks and bread lines as he sold his bread, hot dog buns, pies and cakes. My Dad was 'Big Mike' and I loved listening to his endless stories and tall tales - stopping at fishing holes along the way. All day rides in Big Mike's Buick was my Steamboat - his stories and an entire world at War was my Mississippi."
As an adult Jerry worked as a proof reader and printer's liaison, he later wrote and produced industrial sales and training films. As an accomplished writer for public relations and advertising agencies, he would become Chief Marketing Officer for several prominent companies.
Jerry's favorite authors are: John Steinbeck - "Steinbeck could peer out from the window of a person's soul." Ernest Hemingway -"Grandpa Hemingway could establish both character and plot in a single sentence." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - "His Sherlock would keep you eager for more of his clues and their brilliant anecdotes than the crime's solution." Mark Twain - "Samuel Langhorne Clements was the irreverent, thought provoking, deceptively caustic, the Howard Stern of his day."

Table of Contents

ONE
Joggin' Your Memory
TWO
The War is Behind Us
Three
Idle Summer Hands
FOUR
The Stare Down Wrestle
Five
Jerry Gets a Summer Job
Six
What to Do with a Runaway
Seven
A Prayerful Sunday
Eight
Penance and the Road Pirates
Nine
August Scare of a Lifetime
Ten
Plans and Presidents
Eleven
Secrets and Notes
Twelve
The Mikes Meet the Judge
Thirteen
Coded Messages and the Summer Hayride
Fourteen
Hail from the Chief
Fifteen
The S.O.S. is Called
Sixteen
Luck and a Brilliant Idea
Seventeen
The Hook is Baited
Eighteen
Saved by Providence
Nineteen
A Full Moon Beckons
Twenty
One Dove Says it All
AFTERTHOUGHT

Editorial Reviews

FOREWORD - 5 STARS
Antil delivers heartfelt messages of caring and hope in a wholesome young-adult adventure.
It was 1953 and the family farm was alive and well in upstate New York. Whole communities came together to celebrate the harvest or rally around those in need. The shadows of World War II still hovered over the people and colored their lives. In The Book of Charlie, Jerome Mark Antil paints a charming and nostalgic picture of this time and place through the further adventures of the Pompey Hollow Book Club.
In this second book of the series, the kids of the book club are now teenagers, but their appetite for adventure hasn't faded. When one of them notices a couple of strangers casing the countryside, apparently in search of items to steal, the club is drawn into a mystery bigger than they could have imagined. With the help of President Eisenhower's grandson, the club president's pen pal, the group embarks on a journey that intertwines with a war-era military mystery, pulling in a few lost souls along the way.
In this story, it's easy to see how Antil is influenced by Mark Twain. The narrator, Charlie Pitts, is an old neighbor who passed away in the last book and is now the kids' guardian angel. His colloquial voice, heavily colored in the local dialect and tinged with wry humor-along with the rural landscape and escapades where childhood innocence bumps up against the fears of the time-are reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn. Though some may find the story to be a little too rambling and saccharine at times, Antil manages to deliver heartfelt messages of caring and hope in a lighthearted, wholesome adventure. "You might take a lesson from this, the ways it was with young people in those days; days when young ones thought more about people around them than they did about their own selves," Charlie suggests. "Some say it were the quality of their Guardian Angels back then."
While aimed at a young-adult audience, this book will also appeal to older generations who would enjoy either reminiscing about their childhood or just taking a break from the eleven-o'clock-news style of entertainment to read a book that acknowledges serious issues (such as war, crime, and disease) while remaining eternally optimistic and sweet.
Disclosure: No fee was paid by the author for this review.
KIRKUS REVIEW
Raucous adventure abounds in Antil's (The Long Stem Is in the Lobby, 2013 etc.) heartfelt coming-of-age novel set in upstate New York during the 1950s.
Fans of Antil's The Pompey Hollow Book Club (2011) will be eager to learn more about the misadventures of their favorite club members in this colorful follow-up novel. It's the summer before their freshman year of high school, a time when they begin to leave childhood behind but are nonetheless itching for adventure as much as ever. The story is told from the perspective of ghostly Ole Charlie, a kindly neighbor who has passed and is now the group's guardian angel. Fast-paced and action-packed, the novel follows young Jerry and his friends as they get their first jobs, rescue orphans and down-on-their-luck polio victims, and plan their biggest caper yet to catch a pair of criminals. Though the intrigue surrounding the two escaped criminals and the subsequent plan to flush them out are what pushes the novel forward, its heartbeat lies in the quiet moments that reveal the character of this close-knit community. Following World War II, which forever changed their lives, these communities have emerged stronger than ever. The people work together, care for each other's kids, rally behind perfect strangers with abounding kindness and believe in the basic good in each person. As the kids of the surrounding communities all come together to protect their towns, a beautiful sense of brotherhood emerges; it's an uplifting examination of what community really means.
...it's a delightful read.
A beautiful balance of action and warmth.

From the Publisher

Antil delivers heartfelt messages of caring and hope in a wholesome young-adult adventure.It was 1953 and the family farm was alive and well in upstate New York. Whole communities came together to celebrate the harvest or rally around those in need. The shadows of World War II still hovered over the people and colored their lives. In The Book of Charlie, Jerome Mark Antil paints a charming and nostalgic picture of this time and place through the further adventures of the Pompey Hollow Book Club.In this second book of the series, the kids of the book club are now teenagers, but their appetite for adventure hasn't faded. When one of them notices a couple of strangers casing the countryside, apparently in search of items to steal, the club is drawn into a mystery bigger than they could have imagined. With the help of President Eisenhower's grandson, the club president's pen pal, the group embarks on a journey that intertwines with a war-era military mystery, pulling in a few lost souls along the way.In this story, it's easy to see how Antil is influenced by Mark Twain. The narrator, Charlie Pitts, is an old neighbor who passed away in the last book and is now the kids' guardian angel. His colloquial voice, heavily colored in the local dialect and tinged with wry humor-along with the rural landscape and escapades where childhood innocence bumps up against the fears of the time-are reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn. Though some may find the story to be a little too rambling and saccharine at times, Antil manages to deliver heartfelt messages of caring and hope in a lighthearted, wholesome adventure. \"You might take a lesson from this, the ways it was with young people in those days; days when young ones thought more about people around them than they did about their own selves,\" Charlie suggests. \"Some say it were the quality of their Guardian Angels back then.\"While aimed at a young-adult audience, this book will also appeal to older generations who would enjoy either reminiscing about their childhood or just taking a break from the eleven-o'clock-news style of entertainment to read a book that acknowledges serious issues (such as war, crime, and disease) while remaining eternally optimistic and sweet.

Foreword Review (5 STAR)