The Community of Corrigan is a charming town, they're passionate about their sporting prowess, upholding the law and being pleasant to their neighbours. As long as your neighbours are white. On a warm Australian summer night, fourteen year old Charlie Bucktin walked through Corrigan with sixteen year old Jasper Jones, his innocence and naivety abandoned to the night.
How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that's been shaken. There's a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it's now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris.
Jasper Jones is a quiet, intelligent, part Indigenous Australian young man in a predominantly white town. He's treated as an outcast and the harbinger of disorder, culpable for crime and leading their youth astray. Since losing his mother, his alcoholic father had abandoned the family home and his son, leaving the sixteen year old to fend for himself. Jasper's discovery is sickening, incredibly confronting and violent but imperative to the narrative.
Charlie is young and charmingly naive. His mother is verbally abusive and acidic, frustrated at her life cemented in small town Australia. His father, a local teacher and a strong advocate for the written word. Charlie's father is a kind and gentle soul, withstanding the vitriolic attitude of his wife. His love of words has encouraged Charlie to read and aspire to become an author himself.
The town of Corrigan is fueled by racial tension and exclusion during the Vietnam war era, experienced by Charlie's best friend Jeffrey Lu and his family, having migrated by Vietnam. Jeffrey was a wonderful friend to Charlie, supportive and endlessly amusing. The racism and cruelty that the Lu family faces was deplorable. The casual bullying by the local cricket team that Jeffrey was so desperately seeking inclusion, the physical and racial verbal abuse by teens and complacent adults was nothing short of disgusting. Jeffrey was inspirational, determined to prove his sporting worth despite his small stature.
Although the community mentality has begun to progress, Jasper Jones is confronting, especially for those who have experienced violence, racism or prejudice, although Charlie's white narrative tends to obscure the explicit nature for the teen audience. An important fictional narrative of Australian history.
It was phenomenal.
http://www.divabooknerd.com/2017/02/jasper-jones.html