Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

We were actually planning to finish this book last trip, but ended up hiking with my nephew and then bringing him back with us. It wasn’t fair to start in the middle of a book, so we put it off until our next adventure. 

 

Anyway, we previously listened to Moon Over Manifest by the same author, and enjoyed that. Like the former book, this one was set in the past, featured marginalized characters, and required a bit of suspension of disbelief at some of the events. 

Navigating Early is set immediately after World War II. The narrator, Jack, has grown up in Kansas, mostly with his mother, while his father fought overseas. But his mother unexpectedly dies, and Jack is uprooted and placed in a boarding school near where his father is deployed. 

 

While there, he finds he has difficulty fitting in with the (mostly) richer boys, but does find an unexpected friend in Early Auden, a boy who would now be diagnosed as autistic and a math savant. Back then, of course, he was just “odd.” (Obvious note here: many people who are now labeled as autistic, neurodivergent, transgender, or non-binary were just labeled “odd” back in the day. So the perceived increase in their numbers are “caused” by our better understanding of them, not an actual increase in the incidence of neurodiversity.) 

 

Early is obsessed with the number Pi, which he can compute in his head, and which he also experiences as a multi-sensory experience - colors, shapes, sounds - and most importantly, as a story. 

 

This is what becomes the central event in the story. When Jack’s father is delayed in picking him up for the holidays, he is unexpectedly left alone at school with Early, who decides to embark on a quest, following in the footsteps of Pi (the number and the character in the story) - and to perhaps find Early’s older brother Fisher, who is MIA in the war. 

 

The quest starts off fairly innocuously. They take a school boat up the river, heading for the Appalachian Trail, with the intent of tracking the legendary giant bear (aka Ursa Major - the constellation Pi follows.) But then, things start going weird. And also, their quest starts to follow the path of the story that Early is telling, based on how the digits of Pi appear to him as he calculates them. 

 

They are kidnapped by pirates (of a sort), the leader of which is also on the trail of the giant bear, and seems to be hiding some sort of a dark secret. Jack is rescued from a fall into the river by a mysterious norse sailor-turned-outfitter with a sad history of lost love. They get lost, only to find refuge in the home of an old woman who mistakes Jack for her young son, who never came home….nearly 100 years ago. 

 

And there are the other questions. Will they find the bear? Will they find Fisher? Are there Timber Rattlesnakes in Maine? Will the story of Pi ever end? 

 

The adventures along the way are engrossing, but the core of the story is the growing friendship between Early and Jack, two souls haunted by loss, adrift in a world that doesn’t have a clear place for them. 

 

As with Moon Over Manifest, Vanderpool does a great job of creating sympathetic characters who exist on the margins of society. Whether the hobo child Jinx (in the former book), or the neurodivergent Early in this one, she gives depth and nuance to people who are often either kept at the margins or exoticised. Early is no impossible saint, but rather a boy with his own fears and grief and hopes and dreams. He may be different in a number of ways, but his very human connection with Jack does both of them good. 

 

Vanderpool’s books show evidence of plenty of research - she gets period details correct, including language. One obvious example is the use of “colored” rather than “black” or “African American” in this book. There are no slurs used, but the language is of the time the book is set in - just like the lack of vocabulary to describe Early, or, for that matter, PTSD, which becomes important at the end of the book. Other cultural references are spot on, as are the questions about the war and global politics which are often glossed over now that we know about the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges. At the time, things were not as morally simple as they appear in retrospect - particularly through the lens of American hegemony. 

 

Vanderpool has only written the two books, but both of them are worth reading. I should also point out that her list of favorite books explains plenty about her choice of subjects and stories. Combined, you see the themes of adventures and oddball characters as constants. Many of the books she lists were favorites of mine as well. 

 

The audiobook is mostly narrated by Robbie Draymond, but with contributions from Mark Bramhall and Cassandra Campbell as well. It is a good production, and worked well for our travels.