Bo at Ballard Creek
By Kirkpatrick Hill, Henry Holt & Co., 284 pages, 2013, $15.99
The kids are back in school, and parents and teachers are once again tasked with finding them quality books to help improve their reading skills. One recent entry that fits that bill comes from Fairbanks resident Kirkpatrick Hill. Hill is a lifelong Alaskan, retired elementary school teacher and author of seven previous children's and young-adult novels -- most of them award-winning. Having spent decades in the Bush, she knows Alaska well and brings it to life in her stories.
"Bo at Ballard Creek" is the tale of a 5-year-old girl living in a small mining camp located near an Eskimo village on the Koyukuk River. Set at the tail end of the 1920s, the book presents a sweet but never sugarcoated slice of life in post-Gold Rush Alaska, when miners had long since given up expecting to find the mother lode, but kept toiling anyway because it was the only life they knew.
As the story opens, we meet the young protagonist who we learn had been abandoned as a baby by her mother, a rather bitter dancehall girl known as Mean Millie. Millie had simply handed the child off to Arvid Ivorson, a giant of a man originally from Sweden, and departed aboard a riverboat. So Arvid, along with Jack Jackson, another gentle giant who is African-American and hails from Louisiana, assumed the job of raising the little girl -- with help from villagers and fellow miners -- in tiny, remote Ballard Creek.
Simple but lively
Right away, Hill is employing that primal fear of losing one's parents that young children possess and which has been parlayed by so many authors. She uses the device well, creating in Bo a precocious and independent heroine whom children will relate to closely.
The book follows Bo through a year of her life at Ballard Creek. As in the real world, the story is episodic and doesn't pursue a direct plot curve. Here too, Hill plays to her audience well. The book is aimed at children just graduating to chapter books, as well as those who are not yet reading but want adults to read them longer stories than those found in picture books. Hill creates lively scenes that follow a logical progression but avoids any complexity that would lose younger readers.
The most rewarding wonder of this book is how beautifully Hill creates the village of Ballard Creek and her skillfulness in peopling it with believable characters. She spent part of her own childhood in a similar community outside Fairbanks, so she knows what she's trying to create here and she succeeds masterfully.
As Bo wanders between the work camp and the Native village it neighbors, readers meet an array of characters that are true to the sort of people once found in such communities. Mining operations employed transient workers who often hailed from foreign lands. Thus we meet men from Yugoslavia, Germany, Finland and elsewhere. Known for their quirks as much as anything, they come with names like Jimmy the Pirate, thus dubbed because he sports an eye patch; Cannibal Ivan, who prefers his meat undercooked; and By-Golly-Ollie, who is forever uttering the phrase that becomes his nickname.
Native village life at the time was also in transition, with many permanent settlements being established. Elders still clung to old ways while the younger generation was busy adopting Western technologies and practices. As Bo visits her Native friends, this sense of rapid change in a culture naturally falls into the story.
Entertaining and educational
Hill proves herself adept at weaving a broad range of things about Alaska into the storyline, making the book as educational as it is entertaining. Young readers will learn how sluice boxes work, where and why gold can be found under certain geologic conditions, what temperature snow can and can't fall at, and other scientific and technological details. They'll also find out about Native subsistence practices, as well as the elements of daily life for white settlers and Natives alike in a remote place at a time when there were few of the conveniences today's Alaskans enjoy.
The arrival of the village's first ever airplane warrants its own chapter, demonstrating to young readers how this was once a new and daring mode of transportation.
Hill blends all of this into the story with such seemingly effortless ease that kids won't even realize they've been getting history and science lessons. For example, a crucial part of Alaska insect life gets slipped in when summer arrives and Bo finds herself tortured by bugs.
"The first mosquitoes were gone," Hill writes, "the lazy, slow-moving, long-legged ones that hid all winter under the spruce bark. Now the summer mosquitoes had hatched, much smaller and more ornery."
It's there and gone in two sentences, but kids will remember it. They'll also find their vocabularies expanded without their knowing.
Hill doesn't paper over the less respectable side of mining camp life. Some of the women are there for self-employment, while some of the men drink heavily. Hill doesn't go into the seamy details, she just presents these things for the everyday part of the culture they were at the time -- something more in the open and not necessarily grounds for ostracism. In so doing, she adds to the historical authenticity of her story.
The book's strengths in this area have attracted national attention. "Bo at Ballard Creek" was awarded the 2014 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, which goes to authors who write kids' novels with historical themes. It's a well-deserved recognition for a book in which a time and place that few people experienced is lovingly recreated by an author who knows it firsthand.
David A. James is a Fairbanks-based writer and critic.