Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree
Emma-Jean Lazarus is strange–strange as in extraordinary, remarkable, and singular. Much like her father before her, Emma-Jean finds people to be too complicated and illogical and relationships to be too messy. Yet, when she encounters a crying classmate, she makes a decision to walk through the invisible door that separates her from her fellow seventh graders.
Emma-Jean’s heroes are her deceased father Eugene and her father’s hero French mathematician Jules Henri Poincare. Emma-Jean embraces Poincare’s maxim that “even the most complex problems could be solved through a process of creative thinking.” She takes this advice to heart, and, with a mixture of logic and creativity (and some graphic design and forgery know-how), she solves her crying classmate’s problem–Problem: nice girl wants to go on a ski trip with her best friend, but her best friend has invited mean girl; Solution: forge a letter to mean girl so that she thinks she has been invited to perform center stage and will forfeit the ski trip she never cared about anyway.
No sooner has she “fixed” this situation than another classmate’s messy problem intertwines with her life. Again, she finds herself involved. Again, she uses logic to “fix” the problem (and at this point, she’s becoming quite skilled at forging documents). Unfortunately, at this point, her solution to the first problem is unraveling, and Emma-Jean both literally and metaphorically winds up falling out of a tree. Along with all of this other mess and complication, Emma-Jean’s also dealing with her feelings regarding her mother’s burgeoning relationship with their upstairs boarder.
Post-tree plunging episode, Emma-Jean’s mother tells her, “Things don’t always work out the way we want them to. We try, and sometimes we get hurt, and sometimes we cry. I guess you could say we even fall out of a tree, in a manner of speaking. But we get up. And the next time we don’t go up the same tree, or maybe we go up, but hold on tighter.”
Emma-Jean ponders what her mother tells her and at the same time she couples her mother’s sagacity with another of Poincare’s sayings, “It is by logic that we prove, but it is in our hearts that we discover life’s possibilities.” Logic-employing, observation-making, research-gathering, Emma-Jean Lazarus discovers that despite the world’s oft-times unfairness and people’s oft-times irrationality, new friendships and deepening relationships are worth the complications.
It is tempting to label Emma-Jean because of her peculiarities and detached reasoning (she has been compared to Mark Haddon’s logical, autistic protagonist Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime). But Emma-Jean is not labeled inside the book, so why should we take the liberty to do so? She’s just complicated–like every other middle schooler in her class.
It’s true that connecting with people does not come naturally for Emma-Jean (it did not come naturally to her father either), but she chooses to participate and to “fall out of the tree.” She’s not the first eccentric protagonist in children’s literature, but she is wholly original, uniquely wise, and completely endearing. My hope is that Tarshis brings Emma-Jean back for more involvement with life and all its messy complications in the near future.
Notable Quotes from the Book:
Hurt feelings, bruised egos, broken promises, betrayed confidences—the list of emotional injuries her fellow seventh graders inflicted on one another was dismayingly long.
Emma Jean liked her peers, “But their behavior was irrational. And as a result, their lives were messy. Emma-Jean disliked disorder of any kind, and had thus made it her habit to keep herself separate, to observe from afar”
When she was much younger, spending time with other children often left her feeling confused, as though she were visiting with creatures of a different species.
Emma-Jean had observed her peers closely over the years. Her painstaking research had given her a much clearer understanding of their complex emotional lives and surprising sensitivities.
posted in middle grades, realistic fiction, book review, children's literature | 1 Comment
