7 October 2015 CATCH YOU LATER, TRAITOR by Avi, Algonquin Young Readers, March 2015, 304p., ISBN: 978-1-61620-359-7

“Come and keep your comrade warm

I’m back in the U.S.S.R.

You don’t know how lucky you are, boys.

Back in the U.S.S.R”

--Lennon/McCartney (1968)

“Hands folded, eyes front, I sat in my corner desk. No one looked or spoke to me all morning. Not even Kat. I might as well have been sitting on the moon with Bobby. When I raised my hand, Donavan ignored me. When there was a math quiz, before the test monitor gave me a paper, he looked at Donavan, as if asking permission. I got all the quiz answers right but only got 89 percent, because Donavan took off points for things like not making a plus sign clear.”

It’s 1951 in Brooklyn, New York, and twelve-year-old Pete Collison is going through an ordeal reminiscent of what Stanley Yelnats went through at Camp Green Lake. This is no laughing matter. The U.S. is in the Cold War with Russia and the McCarthy witch hunt has begun. At Parent’s Night, Pete’s father says something to Pete’s teacher, Mr. Donavan, about Donavan’s need to teach more about the history of Negroes and the working man. Now Donavan has told everyone to stay away from Pete because he and his father are Commies. Donavan is even friends with an F.B.I agent who begins following Pete around outside of school and eventually confronts him and demands information.

CATCH YOU LATER, TRAITOR is a taut historic fiction-mystery about the zealotry surrounding the Cold War and its devastating impact upon so many innocent Americans. Pete Collison is an aficionado of detective stories, and CATCH YOU LATER, TRAITOR is written in the manner of such a story, with clipped sentences and lots of character description. Told in the first person from Pete’s point of view, there are occasional third-person passages as if Pete were writing a detective story about himself. But Pete is clearly discovering that living in a fantasy of detective stories is one thing. Finding oneself a marked man in a real-life detective story isn’t so much fun.

In this excellent coming of age tale,  Pete comes to recognize the evil in the world. He learns about the secrets of adults he never saw clearly before, and he comes to understand the complexities and moral decisions that adults sometimes have to make. He learns about betrayal and loyalty in family relationships, and comes to understand how one cannot always take things at face value.

The McCarthy era is a dramatic time in American history that is not that far in our past, one that has not frequently been probed by YA authors. This is an excellent look at these dark times, as told by a master storyteller.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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