Eli the Good: Book Review the Book

Eli the Good: Book Review

The book Eli the Good by Silas House details the summer of ten-year-old Eli Book during the summer of 1976. Eli's family is showing signs of fragmenting. His father is suffering from PTSD and still experiences flashbacks from Vietnam. His mother tries to ignore things and smooth over the rifts that are occurring in the family. His adolescent sister Josie is rebelling against parental control. Eli's few sources of comfort can be found in his friendship with a local girl named Edie; the natural world, and popular culture. There is a constant tension between the beauty of the natural world and the ugliness of the human world, between how things really are and how Eli wishes them to be.

The story takes place during the bicentennial year, and there is a stark contrast between the patriotism and pride in the American government is displaying and the suffering Eli's father is experiencing inside. Eli is wakened by his father's screams at night. Instead of the secure father figure Eli needs and expects, his father is ghost-haunted by a war that clings to the man like a suit. "The war slid right back down his body as if he were stepping into a new set of clothes" (House 254). Eli's sister Josie sharply criticizes the American government her father sacrificed his sanity for: "Let's spend thousands to celebrate two hundred years of stealing from the Indians" (House 164). Later, it is revealed in the book that Josie is not her father's biological child, unearthing a dark secret that lies behind the surface of a happy, American family.

Despite his father's emotional difficulties and the fact that Eli's feelings are often tumultuous as well, the book portrays many happy childhood memories of Eli riding his bike in the woods, playing with Edie, and looking up at the pure sky where he lives. The fact that the story takes place in a rural area makes the residents of the town all the more reluctant to talk about Vietnam in a realistic and open fashion, but also exposes Eli to a great deal of natural wonder. "I straddled my bike and stood listening, watching the trees for signs of birds" (House 7). His mother can identify birds by sound, and no matter how harsh the world around him, Eli feels a sense of connection to nature that is healing and sustaining. "It has a good soul," Edie says of her favorite tree, as if trees can have a personality just as much as people and give comfort (House 10). The trees of the town sharply contrast with the trees of the jungle his father wrote about in his letters to his family from Vietnam yet "he always talked about the trees and he always talked about how he missed my mother and Josie" (House 87). Even the trees of Vietnam were beautiful to his father, suggesting that there are aspects of human nature that not even war can erase.

But Eli is not a pure 'child of nature.' He also has a keen sense of the world around him and is seeking to expand his horizons and sense of personal identity. Just like teens were searching for themselves in the 1970s, so is Eli. Eli identifies with various aspects of pop culture, much like his sister tries to find herself in the loud, boisterous music of Led Zeppelin and protest movements. Eli pretends to be John-Boy Walton, proud of the fact that he is a country boy as well as styling himself as a budding author and loves watching Happy Days and listening to ABBA with his mother.