Bibliophile with Tea

Johnny Tremain was one of my absolute favorite books growing up. It's the reason I decided I wanted to live in Boston. Literally life-changing book for me. I was worried it wouldn't hit the same way as an adult, that I might find it cringey and annoying (the Anne books were a huge disappointment to me as an adult, I actually had to stop halfway through my re-read because they were ruining my memories of the books). And make no mistake about it, this book is pure American Revolution propaganda. And it's not even entirely *good* propaganda, in that there is virtually no detail about what the fight is actually over, just vague references to taxes and some rhetoric about "so a man can stand up," which, I guess, fair enough? Like, sometimes that's all a revolution needs.

And yet. This book, for all its faults, is so incredibly well-written that I almost wanted to weep at how good it felt to just settle into a narrative and not be jolted out of it every few pages by some weird writing choice that made no sense. The world of this book is so vivid. I get why I ended up living in Boston after living it. Boston is so alive on the page. Every character is so alive on the page. And it's done with such a light touch. There are no heavy-handed descriptions of what people look like and what they are wearing. You are told the details about people in unobtrusive ways, in ways that deepen your sense of their characters. In ways that make sense from Johnny's pov. In my memory, this book is about the American Revolution, and it is, but I was struck by how little any of the big-name revolutionaries show up in it. I remember Paul Revere and Joseph Warren as being a little ship of mine from my childhood, and yet, upon re-read, I realized that Joseph Warren is barely in the story. Paul Revere is in it somewhat more, since Johnny is a silversmith. But the two of them share a page only very occasionally. Which means nothing for a ship (says someone from Inception fandom), as long as the characters are drawn vividly enough, and those two are. They talk to each other with inside jokes that Johnny doesn't even understand and that are never explained to us and that so cleverly unfolds their whole history together. There's this part where Revere is urging Warren to get out of Boston and Warren's just like, "What's this? I have never seen you worried about anything before," and that one little sentence just killed me, this seems so silly, these are such little things, it's such a tropey line, and yet none of the books I've been reading recently seem capable of doing these little character moments where everything dwells.

The other revolutionaries are in the story even less than Revere and Warren, and yet they come across so strongly. I found myself, as an adult, wondering if these little details about them were actually true or if Forbes had made them up. She has to have made at least some of them up, but it is an historical fact that John Hancock suffered from bad headaches and it's also such a perfect detail to blow up and exploit, how often Hancock drags himself through revolutionary meetings looking terrible because he feels awful but yet he's determined to be there. Propaganda but effective, you really feel for Hancock and his headaches. Everyone is just so compellingly sketched in just a few short details. There's this one revolutionary everyone dislikes and you never know exactly why -- and even Paul Revere himself says he doesn't know why he doesn't trust him -- and yet it's also so clear in the narrative that everyone is right not to trust him (even though that loop is literally never closed, but it doesn't matter because you just know).

Aside from the historical characters, literally every single other character is fully formed without belaboring it. Johnny's best friend Rab is so clear on the page, despite never being described in lengthy paragraphs. Because he comes across through his actions. And there's this whole family drama in the book (total catnip for young me lol) and there's this part where one of the characters describes Johnny's long-dead mother as a vibrant teenager, and the dialogue never feels contrived and yet also makes that character completely come alive. I always as a child wanted a story about Vinny Lyte, as she is described in a few brief paragraphs. For that matter, even the purported villains of the story are never flat. Johnny has friends who are British soldiers. That's part of the tragedy of the story, which the book doesn't shy away from. And there are characters who do awful things, but they also sometimes reveal a complexity. (Sometimes. There's one character who just apparently is "stupid." Literally what characters keep saying about him. It's an old book.)

The book also does this thing that I've noticed has been lacking in a lot of the recent fiction I've been reading, in that it lets the characters breathe. I feel like the recent books I've been reading have slashed everything that is not directly relevant to whatever the plot is supposed to be. Huge amounts of what should be dialogue on the page just gets summarized in a couple of paragraphs that have been stripped of all personality. Meanwhile, there's this great moment when Johnny meets Rab for the first time, and he's talking to a woman who's lost her pet pig. There's a whole conversation about how the pig was trained to do tricks, and later Rab says to Johnny, "Did you know you could train a pig like that?" and that's how their conversation opens. I feel like in recent books I've read that conversation would have been like, "Johnny met Rab while he was at work. They began talking." Instead of giving me that little detail about the trained pig. Who cares about this random pig? It never comes up again in the story...until oh my god it does and it's so rewarding. Great moment. Great thing to do. This should happen in your fiction! It's so good when it happens!

Also, another little aside that although this book is very male-character-heavy, the women in it tend to be great, too. They shine in their moments on the page, running the gamut of types. My favorite part is how many of the wives are actively assisting the revolutionary effort. This is doubtless more propaganda but it's just nice that they're coming up with subterfuge plots, too.

Anyway. Total propaganda about the founding of the United States but also a book full of such amazing characters. It makes total sense to me that it loomed so large over my childhood. I'm actually really glad it's one of those books that taught me how to write, because I think I like the lessons I learned from it. I don't know if it's the kind of thing that an adult would enjoy without the childhood nostalgia, but it was nice to have it mostly hold up (especially when juxtaposed against how wooden and heavy-handed all of the recent fiction I've been reading is - like, the literal propaganda story has more sensible characters with sensible choices in it).