The Breaker Boys

Too young to vote doesn't mean too young to think. And Pat Hughes' young adult novel, The Breaker Boys, is a fine introduction to social ideas that may be brand new to young readers.

Nate Tanner is the 12-year-old son of a coal mine operator, a fictional amalgam of the 19th-century Pennsylvania mine bosses who became wealthy before railroad companies took control of most of their land.

Though Nate has all the advantages of being a rich boy in 1897—his own bike and baseball glove, a literature tutor and summers in Cape May—he's a loner and a fighter. He was seven when his mother died, leaving him to rattle around the family mansion with his punishing older brother and some pesty younger ones, a critical father and a meddlesome stepmother.

When the story opens our spitfire Nate is getting kicked out of boarding school for impudence, and Hughes's descriptions of the schoolroom give the prose color. But historical details are simply a backdrop for Nate's personal struggle, which is made modern by her appreciation for what it means to be a teenager of any era. "He could never win anyway," Nate thinks, dejected, on his way back home to Hazleton, PA. "And backtalk only made Pa angrier."

Nate, friendless thanks to his tendency to turn disagreements into fist fights, takes his bike out alone one early summer day to pick huckleberries. That's when he meets Johnny, the son of a Polish immigrant who works in his father's mine. Nate knows he could never be friends with someone from the "patches," the ramshackle towns where the miners live, so he pretends to come from a humbler background. Over the course of a baseball game, the breaker boys who work separating slate from coal become his first real friends.

It's a seamless setup to see a piece of history, and its attendant social problems, through the eyes of a protagonist who, because of his wealth, starts out as ignorant of the issues of the era as a young contemporary reader.

Nate enjoys a rollicking birthday party in the patch, learns a few words of Polish, and helps Johnny's mother pump water for supper. But it soon becomes apparent that the family business is fraught with painful conflict. Already resentful toward his father, Nate is quick to believe Johnny's descriptions of the mine bosses' cruelty, especially after witnessing Johnny's family's poverty. But it's more complicated still, Nate discovers when he learns about the railroad monopolies that threaten his own father's livelihood.

Fortunately, Hughes respects her readers enough to trust them with nuance. She shows not just the good on both sides, but the bad, too. Some union workers shirk their jobs and while away afternoons at the tavern, just as some mansion-dwelling mine operators illegally jack up prices at the company store. By the time the situation has become violent -- a reference to a real mining strike in which several workers were shot and killed -- Nate has discovered that some things in life are not black and white.

These are complex ideas, to be sure, but Hughes' tender, energetic story makes them accessible without dumbing them down. Because good writing, for whatever age level, is never about "issues." Nate's friendships, his relationship with his father, and his mother's death are just as important to the story as any larger social commentary. Because of its sense of humanity, The Breaker Boys makes a moment in history resonate in a way that bold-faced words in a textbook never could.