Mick Harte Was Here by Barbara Park

I knew as soon as I saw this challenge, what book I would choose. I’m going way back for this, about 15 years. I’ve loved reading since I was a kid. I was always good at reading. Back in my elementary school days, my grandma who I had lived with along with my mother and father and two siblings, worked at a book factory. A place where they sewed the books together.

Often, there were mistakes. Book assembled in the wrong order, upside down and backwards; my favorite combination. These were the books my grandma would bring home to us kids. One particular day, she had brought home a large box. This was around 5th grade for me I believe, roughly 10 years old. I remember me and my younger sister, who was in kindergarten, finessing our way into staying home from school so we could read these books.

This is where I found Mick Harte Was Here by Barbara Park. I still have this very same upside down and backwards copy on my bookshelf now. I have managed to keep hold of it despite countless moves, homelessness, and losing much of my belongings in a storage shed.

Let me preface this by saying that, up until middle school, I was generally an optimistic child. I tended to be rambunctious and on a never ending mission to keep everyone around me laughing. I had also never experienced the death of a loved one, something I didn’t experience until just a few years ago when my grandfather passed. It wasn’t that I hadn’t just not experienced these things, my young self had not even been touched by them. I had an incredibly positive outlook on life and the world because I didn’t know any better. Until my ten-year-old self sat criss crossed applesauce on the living room floor of my grandparents trailer and devoured this book in one sitting.

It follows Phoebe, the sister of Mick Harte. The book starts with telling you that this 12 year old boy is dead. A bike accident. While the main idea that is trying to be conveyed to the 9-12 year olds who are meant to read this, is bike safety (Mick didn’t wear helmet because he thought it made him look like a dork), there are many other things that I don’t think my prepubescent self was prepared for.

The book follows Phoebe as she tries to deal with and understand the passing of her brother, I won’t say loss because she really doesn’t like that. They were only about a year apart. And when they weren’t fighting over the prizes hidden in the cereal boxes, they had a very loving sibling hood, often teaming up to wreak havoc on those around them. Phoebe struggles with grief, relationships, and even her faith as she tries to process how this could have happened. All the while, remembering Mick in the best ways possible.

This wasn’t the first book I had ever read. I had read several. I had loved reading. But for the wrong reasons and I didn’t realize that until this book. I had loved reading because people loved that I loved it. And I was good at it. I was egged on by always doing so well on those reading tests. You know, the ones where you sit at table out in the hall with the teacher and read out loud until they say “stop”. I would fly through books just so I could boost my ego at all the compliments I would get, without really ever taking in what I was reading. I loved that I would get an award on the end of the semester for most books checked out from the library and that my family would always talk about how much I read.

But this book… this book made me feel. Actually, it made me cry. Which was a lot for an optimistic ten year old to handle, but it was great. Because this was when I realized that books were more than just notches on my academic record and scores on my report card. They were the world, condensed into little rectangles. And not just this world, but more. Ones I could’ve never imagined before. They were happiness and sadness and anger. They were inspiration and creativity.

I still read this book frequently and it still touches me as much as it did that day on the living room floor. I’d like to believe that I would’ve always become the bookworm I am now, regardless. That I would’ve always found my way to them. But I don’t know that I would have had I not read this book. And that’s a sad thought to think.

Because books are everything to me. They take me away when I’m stressed. They give me feeling when I’m not. They teach me, help me open my mind to things I couldn’t have known otherwise. They’re a comfort I desperately love. The best thing is seeing my bookshelf, overflowed as it is, and pulling one off. Or when I order new books and flip the pages by my nose because book-smell is one of the best smells.

And even though I’ve read so many more books since this one, amazing books that have also made me feel incredible things, this one is much like a first love. I think that’s the only way it could have survived this long. And dare I say, my love for it grew as I got older and read it again and again. As I was able to understand things I couldn’t as a 10-year-old. And maybe like Phoebe, who just wanted everyone to know that Mick Harte was here, I want people to know that I’m here too.