Pay Attention, Carter Jones

Title: Pay Attention, Carter Jones
Author: Gary D. Schmidt
Major Themes: Cricket, Family, Divorce, Death, Sports
Synopsis: When one day the Butler showed up on Carter’s family’s stoop, they had no idea how he would benefit their family.

Some time ago, one of my children was working on a writing lesson. He was supposed to find examples of hooks at the beginning of several stories. We pulled a few books off the shelf and read the first sentences. One of them really stood out. It read, “If it hadn’t been the first day of school, and if my mother hadn’t been crying her eyes out the night before, and if the fuel pump on the Jeep had been doing what a fuel pump on a Jeep is supposed to be doing, and if it hadn’t been raining like an Australian tropical thunderstorm—and I’ve been in one, so I know what it’s like—and if the very last quart of one percent milk hadn’t gone sour and clumped up, then probably my mother would never have let the Butler into our house.” Well, that caught our attention. Everyone within earshot wanted to read Pay Attention, Carter Jones. It still took a long time to get around to reading it, but we finally did.  It was every bit as interesting as it sounded from the first sentence.

The first chapter describes Carter’s first day of middle school. Chaos reigned in the Jones household as they were trying to get ready for school. Then the doorbell rang. When Carter opened the door, he found an English Butler standing there. Neither Carter, nor any of the rest of the family, expected the Butler to stay, but he did.

Within a few days, Carter learned about the Butler’s passion. The Butler introduced Carter and his friends to cricket, the most civilized, most beautiful sport in the world. The next thing they knew, they were preparing for a test match on the school football field. Meanwhile, Carter was going through many different emotions. The Australian tropical thunderstorms he had experienced kept coming into his mind, along with the trauma that led to his experiencing them. Then, his family was hit with a curveball they did not see coming. Without the Butler and his wisdom, Carter would have been in bad shape.

Pay Attention, Carter Jones made us laugh and nearly made us cry. The Butler’s reactions to American culture were very funny. At the same time, this book deals with death and the break up of a family, and some of those scenes are very sad. Cricket is the theme that really ties this book together. Each chapter is titled with a term used in cricket, which is defined in the heading of the chapter. The way cricket took over the school was pretty funny. When we got near the end of the book, everyone wanted to read extra so we could find out how the test match went. We all learned more about cricket than we ever wanted to know.  I highly recommend this book to help children develop empathy for other children who are going through hard times. It’s a well-written book that shows the hard things of life without being too explicit.

WARNING: The word stupid is used over and over (twice in Chapter 3, twice in Chapter 4, multiple times in two places in Chapter 5, multiple times in one place in Chapter 13) dang once each in Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 26 and Chapter 27. In Chapter 12, Carter pictures terrible injuries on a battlefield; a man announces to his family he won’t be coming home to them again. Chapter 13: a child dies.

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