Book Reviews — “The Labors of Hercules Beale” and “Okay for Now”
June, 2025
by Becky Givens, Class of Spring 2024
A lecture or a textbook may engage the mind, but a story engages the heart. By planting a seed in the heart, there is hope that it will spring up into action.
Today I want to introduce you to an author you are probably not familiar with, Gary D. Schmidt, who writes books for middle school age kids. His characters are kids who are going through really hard times - the death of parents or friends, the Vietnam war, bad home situations, and his message is one of hope - hang on, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and don’t give up. His books are not pie-in-the-sky-pretend-life-is-wonderful stories. The struggles and problems are real, but in the end his characters learn and survive and find hope.
While Schmidt is not writing with a message specifically about conservation or nature, two of his books are worthy of our attention because these concepts are woven into the storylines.
The first is “The Labors of Hercules Beale.” This boy with the unfortunate name of Hercules is 12 years old and has recently lost his parents in a car accident. He and his older brother work to keep themselves and the family nursery going. Along the way Hercules is enrolled in an immersion middle school for environmental studies, where his home room teacher, Lt. Colonel Hupfer, assigns him a school project involving the Labors of Hercules myth. Each chapter revolves around one of these labors. Somehow this book is hysterically funny and terribly heartbreaking and full of hope, all at the same time. The story is full of great literature, art, and the environment. I highly recommend this book, either in print or the audio version, for the kid in your life and for yourself. You are never too old for a good children’s book. I listened to the audio book while on a long trip and spent the drive alternately laughing and crying. It is so good that I have listened to it more than once.
The second Gary D. Schmidt book I recommend to you is called “Okay for Now.” This one is distinctly darker than our first book. This time our main character is Doug Swieteck, an 8th grader who moves to upstate New York in 1968. He has a terrible home life, but at the local library he sees a first edition of Audubon’s Birds of America on display. Audubon’s artwork lights a fire in this boy, and completely changes the course of his life. Each chapter begins with a different bird painting, and Doug loses himself in the painting, both in what the bird is doing and thinking, and in the beauty of the artwork and the brushstrokes. The theme of the painting is then woven throughout the chapter as Doug navigates his difficult home life in a new town with new teachers and new friends. I don’t want to spoil the story by giving you too much detail, so I’ll just say that Doug and I learned a lot about life in our time together. And like Doug, I will be looking at Audubon’s paintings with a very different eye from now on.
C.S. Lewis says, "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty."
So give yourself and the kids in your life the gift of reading these books. And any other title by Gary D. Schmidt. I’ve learned from and enjoyed all of them.