Moving Day

The other day I was idly flipping through the books in my possession, searching for one contained poems. A well-written book of poems by a single author that also happens to be pleasing to the eye is a rare and wonderful thing. Emphasis on the word "rare". And "Moving Day", to be honest with you, didn't get my attention right off the bat. The cover is rather lovely but I credit illustrator Jennifer Emery for penciling in the autumn leaves that finally lured me closer. Written in a series of small autobiographical poems, author Ralph Fletcher tells the simple story of a twelve-year-old boy whose family is moving from one state to another and the problems that come with something so seemingly simple. The new mountain bike probably should have tipped Fletch off right from the start. Ditto the fact that his little brother Ray got a hockey outfit out of the clear blue sky. Their family is going to move near to Lake Erie and there isn't a darned thing Fletch can do about it. It's rough. First his friends start separating from him before he's even moved away. Then there's the fact that he'll never see that cute girl, Gwen with the dark sparkly eyes, ever again. Slowly, however, good things happen as well. While packing he finds his Willie Mays baseball card he lost a while ago. He will never (perhaps) carry the unfortunate nickname of "Retch" instead of "Fletch". And when at last he finds himself in a new home with a new room, there are new people about, a doorknob that lights up like a diamond when the sun hits it in the morning, and leaves that swirl, old and new, together. The writing itself is more than a little clever. For example, Fletch's little brother Ray is always worrying about seemingly minor things. He wants it perfectly clear that his mother is not allowed to throw any people away. And when he asks his dad at the dinner table if the moon will stay in Massachusetts his dad says without hesitation that the moon is coming with them to Ohio. On hearing this, Fletch says, "Just the kind of thing to make you feel better, if you're a little kid". You get the definite feeling from this that the little kid he's referring to may not necessarily mean Ray. There are thirty-four poems in total here and together their story is one of ups and downs of an everyday nature. Sometimes I wondered whether or not certain sections were taken directly from Mr. Fletcher's own life. Did a mover "not much bigger than me" really come into the kitchen and carry out a refrigerator on his back while quoting Archimedes' great line, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth!"? Did his friend Kyle really give him a going away present of a shoebox filled with ball bearings alongside his friend Alex's gift of "decapitated piñatas"? I don't suppose it matters, since they work so well within the story. I just wanted to know. Then there are the illustrations to take into account. Ms. Jennifer Emery has taken the good design choice of rendering all the poems in easy