Wringer - Review

Wringer by Jerry Spinelli is about a 9 year old boy living in a town that has tradition every summer, at the end of the Family Fest, to have a pigeon shooting contest.  Five thousand pigeons are brought in the night before, released and shot out of the sky.  The fallen birds are collected by the 10 yr old boys and counted for points based on a clean kill or wounded.  The wounded birds have the necks wrung by the 10 yr olds to "put them out of their misery".  The boy, Palmer, knows he doesn't want to be a wringer, and the looming event haunts him as does the smell of gun smoke and the orange button eyes of the birds.  Palmer has also been newly initiated into a relatively innocent gang of boys where being wringers, The Treatment, having a nick name, and so on - is a part of the tradition of growing up (even Palmer's dad experienced all these things).

What I liked: The book is written around this one event - and the dread and anticipation of it is done so well.  The combination of the boy's real emotions, and a 9 year olds misperceptions are very believable.  The boy is unable to express and sometimes even identify what he is really feeling - laughing with the boys, and then running away crying - and it is beautiful and sensitive writing.

What I didn't like:  The event and the boys emotions has the somberness of a trauma.  Trauma and the subsequent pain that haunts children is a heavy topic - and the book was written as such, just using the "lighter" prop of pigeons as the source.  There was some resolve at the end, but not enough.

Also, I'm not sure the opening image made sense:  "He did not want to be a wringer . . . it was deep inside.  In the stomach, like hunger."  Spinelli goes on  to say its different because hunger comes and goes - and I have to say it's different because hunger is associated with something you want or need, but it's the opposite, he doesn't want to be a wringer.  So I'm not sure the image worked here.




What I would have like to read: If the book is going to be so heavy, and trauma like - let's get the ending to treat the root of the problem, as needed in real traumas - not the by-product.  I know I'm always too much for the happy unrealistic ending - but I would have liked the town to have seen and understood the horror the boy felt, or at least - be more empathetic.  It may be too cheesy - but ending Pigeon Day all together I would have felt more resolve.

Quotes:
"Sometimes his mother tried to make something come true simply by saying it." p22
"You can thank a pigeon for the swings at the playground." p38 (justification for the Pigeon Shoot day where proceeds go to the upkeep of the public park).

"A voice came out of the crowd. 'How will we know if it's dead or not?'
Somebody yipped, 'Take its pulse!'
The man's' glare cut off the laughter.
The trees were silent.
'You'll know,' said the man.
The sky was empty." p97

"During the week his father said many things, mostly with his hands.  He rubbed Palmer's hair and squeezed his shoulder and tugged on his shirt and tickled his ribs and pulled him backward with a finger hooked in the back pocket of his jeans and lightly brushed the side of his neck with his fingertips as he stopped and chatted with friends.  Each of these things had a different meaning to Palmer and yet the same - a language unleaded, of words unheard, that came to roost at some warm and waiting perch far below his ears." p127

"It is the boy who, so to speak, wears the collar, that it is never the pigeon, but the boy, who is lost." p135