The Silent Boy, by Lois Lowry - Historical Fiction

I decided to read The Silent Boy by Lois Lowry because she fascinated me with her craft in The Giver and Number the Stars. She works so well with foreshadowing and character manipulation that before you know it, you are at the end of the book and are amazed at something that occurred that you really had no idea was coming. It is almost like watching a detective show and waiting until the very last minute of the show to realize who the bad guy really is. Well, Lois Lowry once again did not disappoint me with The Silent Boy.

The Silent Boy is set back in American history when cars were first being invented, but in small towns, doctors still move around in horse and wagons. The main character, Katy, is telling the story from a memory in her mind that deeply imprinted itself on her in her childhood. In the beginning she is now an older woman, having become a doctor, been married to a kind man, and raised many a child and grandchild. Now, at the end of her life, she wants to tell the story of Jacob, who is a mentally handicapped boy (I would guess he had autism, but it is never said) who sends his time trying to care for animals, never talking, and making funny little sounds to himself. Katy, the local doctor’s daughter, decides to befriend him as much as she can, and takes his side when tragedy strikes. Jacob’s two sisters, Nell and Peggy work in town as hired out girls, and Peggy stays and works with Katy’s family. At the end of the book the reader discovers that Nell and another well-to-do boy have had an affair and Nell is pregnant. Nell doesn’t want the baby and the boy is now having nothing to do with her, so Jacob tries to care for the baby the best way that he knows how, but taking it to another mother (Katy’s mother). However, along the way the baby dies and everyone thinks that Jacob maliciously drowned the baby. Only Katy knows the truth, but being only an eight-year-old child, no one listens to her. The boy is sent to the local Asylum and never heard from again. This story has haunted Katy, now an older woman, all of her life.

Lowry created this book from old pictures that she discovered along the way of her life; old pictures of strangers that she had never met, but desired to make a book about. I have not read a lot of books set in the early 1900s (1911 in this book), set right before the depression and World War II, but this one was very interesting to some extent. I was not drawn into it like I was in The Giver and Number the Stars, but I did want to get to the bottom line of what had happened at the beginning of the story that the main character was remembering back about. Lowry does tend to write stories that deal with the underprivileged and unfortunate citizens in our society. I think that she tries to, with her words, make the wrongs of this world obvious to us and to allow us, the readers, to change our own lives to make the unfortunate citizen’s lives better. With Jacob, he is a person who is trapped in his own mind of solidarity, but he loves animals and being kind to other people. I hate the fact that whenever anything goes wrong in the town (the mill burning down, as an example) that they blame Jacob. When he tries to care for a human baby that is his sisters’, who doesn’t want to take care of it, the baby ends up dying. The boy who loved animals and roaming around in the great outdoors was sentenced to the rest of his life in the Asylum, where people scream and yell, because they are out of their minds. I am saddened to think how scared Jacob must have been in this place and how unhappy he was, as well. This is so sad and so true of ways that mentally handicapped people were treated back in those days. Jacob didn’t belong in the Asylum, he belonged with a family who loved him and were patient with him. He belonged in a place where he could care for small and pitiful animals and bring them back to the living. Yes, mental institutions are meant for some people with illnesses, but it was not meant for Jacob, who most likely struggled from autism. So sad, and yet so much of a mirror image of our own society. Have we gotten better at treating and caring for people with mental disabilities? I hope so. This reflection of our own society is also another way that Lowry weaves her writer’s craft.