You can like a book without respecting it, or respect it without much enjoying it. I’ve read a lot of books that I enjoyed but didn’t necessarily consider “important,” and a fair few that I might not have liked, but recognized their, let’s call it “nutritional content.”

I didn’t much like the characters in M.C. Higgins, the Great. I couldn’t relate to M.C.’s ways of thinking, most of the time. I wish I’d read it when I was younger, to have that perspective to weigh against reading it for the first time in my mid-fifties.

I often had trouble visualizing the settings or landmarks as described.

But all those things are my tastes, and I think that this book is bigger than my tastes, and not just because of the Newbery Medal emblem on the cover. The very things that make this a book I hadn’t picked up before, when I was younger … that the main characters aren’t animals, or girls who liked horses, or aliens … that it’s about, and from the viewpoint of, hardscrabble “hill people” descended from escaped slaves, living in the shadow of Appalachian strip mining/mountaintop removal mining… suspicious of other communities … these are real and deep and important.

It gets three stars in terms of how much I “liked” it, but if there was a rating for respect it’d get 4 or 4.5.

For what it’s worth, I liked it better than the Flannery O’Connor stories that I had heard about for decades but then found bitter and unpalatable.

In some ways, this book reminds me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Not because the characters are similar so much as for what they share, for their life energy and tenacity.

I think my favorite thing about M.C. Higgins, the Great (the book, not the character) would be the descriptions of the Killburns: the people with freckled skin and reddish hair, grey eyes, etc. My favorite thing about M.C. Higgins, the Great (the person) was his instinctive ease in the woods, his ability to throw a knife, the way he and Ben worked as a team.