With the recent addition of a preteen boy to the Paul & James family, I've been making a concerted effort to catch myself up on the last fifteen or twenty years of youth lit - reacquainting myself with old favorites by the likes of Robert Cormier, and checking out some of the newer writers that have come out since I graduated to the authors on my Existential Lit reading list.

And in my recent travels to the library, while steering clear of the ubiquitous Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books, I chanced upon Cynthia DeFelice, who, after a career as a school media specialist, started storytelling for a living with a group called the Wild Washerwomen, publishing her first novel in the late 1980s.

Like those Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books, DeFelice's historical fictions center on young people facing some of life's darkest challenges. On the other hand, there's nothing fanciful or whimsical about them; the straightforward, even gritty language in her books is far less elegant and - well - British then their bestselling youth lit cousins; and the cold, minimal-but-graphic descriptions of disease and death peppering her 1996 novel The Apprenticeship of Lucas Whitaker are far more Clint Eastwood than Tim Burton.

In the year 1849, on his family farm in Connecticut, 12-year-old Lucas Whitaker has just buried his mother, the last in a long succession of family members to die a long gruesome death in the grip of consumption. Faced with the prospect of carrying on alone in a place full of brutal memories, Lucas decides to run away. With no money, no living family, little education, and no real plan, Lucas walks to the town of Southwick, where a 'Help Wanted' sign brings him to the home of one Doc Beecher and his persnickety sister Cora Bunce, a woman whose obsession with tidiness (she insists that Lucas must bathe - even in Winter!) is well-known and ridiculed in town.

Doc Beecher (but please, call him Doc - everyone does) is the town's doctor, surgeon, barber, and dentist; he signs Lucas on as his apprentice and with a healthy dose of mutual respect, the two become fast friends. Lucas is eager to learn and has a natural bedside manner, and Doc appreciates the boy's inquisitive mind and healthy work ethic. But as the town faces a consumption epidemic, Lucas struggles against the easy superstitions of the town and Doc's studied uncertainty; and master and apprentice find themselves bitterly divided when the townspeople, upset with Doc's insistence that there is no cure for consumption, convene in the town square to perform a mystical and macabre "cure" for their dying loved ones.

The Apprenticeship of Lucas Whitaker not only has a message - an important one, with especial relevance to current events and politics - but it delivers that message as plainly and bluntly as a slap on the back. The resolution of the story is an almost foregone conclusion, and in a book which warns the dangers of thinking with absolute certainty, there's little surprise or ambiguity to the way DeFelice ties up her loose ends. Good thing, then, that the context of the story is so interesting, and so apparently well-researched. DeFelice's Connecticut of 1849 is a harsh place, full of ghosts, disease, whispered accusations and incantations, a place literally consumed with consumption, driven hysterical by it.

DeFelice hardly dwells on the gross-out details of her story, but at the same time, she doesn't shy away from the macabre ritual at the center of the book's conflict, nor from disease and death themselves - an approach that will no doubt pique the interest of some younger readers as much as it repulses others. Written in snappy, quick chapters, it also lends itself well to out-loud reading. The Apprenticeship of Lucas Whitaker has me eager to read more.

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MORE BY CYNTHIA DeFELICE:

Under the Same Sky (2003)

Recommended: Yes