I Ll Sing You One O

Twelve-year-old Gemma doesn’t know where to turn. She is being adopted by relatives she didn’t know she had. The foster family she has loved all her life is breaking up. The farm where they’ve lived is being sold. Gemma needs to fix things fast--if she can only figure out how. Now she has found the solution: she’ll get herself an angel. Her increasingly desperate efforts to earn one, by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, lead her to a confrontation with her painfully mysterious past, and ultimately to an understanding with her new family that holds out hope for them all. This engrossing novel offers a fresh and winning portrait of a quirky heroine with a unique voice, a passionate heart, a mission to accomplish, and the kind of offbeat logic that can cause even the most careful plans to go awry.

“[A] classic story of male adolescence and homophobia . . . this short, richly packed novel may well be [Clark’s] masterpiece.” —DeWitt Henry, author of Falling Two, Two, Lily-White Boys follows the fortunes of two fourteen-year-old Scouts from Ermine Falls—Larry Carstairs, the narrator, and Andy Dellums, Larry’s schoolmate and friend—over the course of six days at Camp Greavy, a Boy Scout camp not far from Traverse City, Michigan. The story’s catalyst and Andy’s tormentor is Russell “Curly” Norrys, a worldly, charismatic seventeen-year-old, a homophobe who suspects that Andy is a homosexual. Mercurial, protean, possibly sociopathic, Curly engineers conflicts that accelerate as the days wear on, eventually culminating in tragedy. Passive-aggressive Larry, moved to action at last, must choose between self-preservation and justice. “In this rite of passage story set at a Boy Scout summer camp, Clark’s protagonist, Larry Carstairs, meets up with Curly Norrys, a curious blend of humor, intellectual acumen, nihilism, and sheer malevolence. Clark makes us feel, full strength, Larry’s struggle with the nature of ambiguity. Clark’s fiction here, as elsewhere, is a compelling mix of straight realism and black humor.” —Jack Smith, author of If Winter Comes “Geoffrey Clark’s Two, Two, Lily-White Boys soberly pierces the Scout Camp Greavey’s character-building scrim of perseverance, steadfastness, and patriotism to reveal what disquiets the minds and hearts of those about to enter the straits of manhood . . . One emerges from this evocative work recalling that daunting passage in past time when we ceased to reason like a child and put childish ways behind us.” —Dennis Must, author of Banjo Grease

Newfoundlanders have long and lustily sung their folksongs, and the tradition remains strong today. Despite modern influences, the old songs persist, mixed with new songs that are composed to record the events of our time. This is the first major collection of Newfoundland folksongs compiled and edited by native Newfoundlanders. It concentrates on songs of local composition largely ignored by earlier collectors and presents a significant number of songs never before published. For most of the last decade Lehr and Best have been travelling around the island recording the voices and favourite songs of anyone, young and old, who would perform. Recordings took place in family kitchens, on stage heads, and in trap stores while the singer knitted twine or repaired lobster pots, aboard ships at anchor or en route to some small deserted harbour. Humming engines, blowing oilstoves, or clattering supper dishes provided accompaniment. The 120 songs collected here by Lehr and Best have been transcribed by Pamela Morgan and illustrated by Elly Cohen. Some recall the distant past of a long and rich seafaring tradition; others tell of such recent tragedies as the displacement of outport people and the sinking of the Ocean Ranger. The selection represents the state of the folk-song in Newfoundland today; in some part it documents what is lost and forgotten, but it also celebrates what has survived, and thrives.