Meely LaBauve (2000)by Ken Wells

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Meely LaBauve (2000)

by Ken Wells

Cathoula Bayou, Louisiana

Louisiana: 28/30

  My ability to handle the 1,001 Novels project is solely due to the fact that I live in Los Angeles and have a Los Angeles Public Library card.  As any diehard library user knows, the strength of a library is not a single branch but the ability to request books from all the different branches, or, in the case of the interlibrary loan used by the American University system, any book in any university library.  The Los Angeles Public Library request feature, which you can use in the app or online, is amazing, and typically the book arrives at my local branch within a week.  I mention that here because I actually had to buy a copy of Meely LaBauve off of Amazon, making it one of the few novels the Los Angeles Public Library doesn't have available.  

   This book is a coming-of-age novel about a child of mixed-race heritage- probably Native American and African American, though given the location and the variability of the racial implications of identifying as a Native American over the years, the question is a fraught one.  Meely is a feral child, living by the Bayou with a father who is equally devoted to fishing and trapping and being a knockdown, drag-out alcoholic It's a boy's life, and the comparison of Meely to a swamp-bound Huck Finn is fair.