One Book Bradford: Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher

If you ever wondered what happened to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Becky Thatcher long after Mark Twain put his pen down, the next installment of One Book Bradford is for you.

The One Book Bradford committee has picked “Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher,” written by Lenore Hart, as this year’s installment of the annual project.

The book is written from Becky’s point of view and clarifies some things Twain left out of his stories. It also reveals what happens to the beloved characters once they became adults.

One of the book’s draws is a strong female title character, something Hart set out to create.

Hart was in the fifth grade when she first checked out “Tom Sawyer.” While she enjoyed the story, she was disappointed in the lack of storyline for the female character.

“She was weepy and romantic and very silly, I thought. No real girls I knew acted that way.”

But it wasn’t until a question was asked by her husband after a brief stay in Hannibal, Missouri, that Hart brought herself to tell Becky’s story. He asked "If you wrote a novel about a grown-up character from Tom Sawyer, which one would it be?"

Her answer, of course, was Becky.

“And when we got home, I began working on it. Little did I know it would take four years, the longest of my novels to date,” Hart said.

What happened during that time was a lot of research and rereading of Twain’s works and biographies.

“Twain is an American icon. I knew some people would be outraged that I even dared . . . but that's a writer's job, isn't it? To dare. To imagine things anew,” Hart said.

And reworking someone else’s work isn’t exactly a new concept, she said, citing works by Shakespeare and Dickens.

“… these realizations made me brave,” she said. “Twain is larger than life, a legend beloved by everyone. Though I was not setting out to best him - a writer I respect and admire - or to mock him, or to "get even." I only wanted to give a fair share of life to a young female character for whom he, as a Victorian man of those rather stuffy and sentimental times, probably could not fully imagine any sort of compelling reality.”

Had Twain been alive and writing now, Hart believes he would write Becky’s character differently.

“He'd be living, after all, in a new millennium,” she said.

And while it would appear following in Twain’s footsteps would be difficult, the Publisher's Weekly review said, "Mark Twain is a hard act to follow, but Hart does her heroine justice."

Hart hopes the readers take away a multitude of things after reading the book, one of which is going back to read “Tom Sawyer” or other books by Twain – some for the first time.

“Nearly everyone knows who Tom Sawyer is, but a surprising number of the people who say they do know have never actually read Twain's novel,” Hart said. “I'd also like them to take away the idea that people in the 19th century were both more like us than we'd ever imagine, and not like us at all in some ways.”

“A novelist who takes a contemporary person with contemporary views and reactions and dresses them up in old-fashioned clothes and calls it ‘historical fiction’ is telling a lie. A person who lived back in the mid-19th century, even a rather enlightened one, would not think about life exactly as we do. They would have certain preconceptions about classes of people, and more obvious racial biases, and firm notions about the roles of the two sexes, and very different manners and ideas about how things should always be - in fact, they'd think and say and do things that we would now find appalling.

“… I want readers to know these long-dead women were once just as real as we are now. They had similar concerns, and loves, and hates, and often had to rise to a challenge far beyond what they had ever expected to face in life. Just as we sometimes must do, now, in our times.”

Hart said she was overjoyed when she was told her book was pegged for One Book Bradford.

“Actually, I would say gleeful,” Hart said. “Because really, how could an author ever make everyone read her book all at once? The answer is, she can't. The best to hope for, normally, is to see someone with your novel in hand at the airport, or maybe to appear at a bookstore and sign copies, or perhaps attend a book club meeting, where everybody at least says they have read it.

“But now my novel will be read simultaneously by a whole town and possibly points beyond, all at once. Wow. The only way to top that now is to get a national holiday named after me.”

One Book Bradford is an initiative led by the Friends of the Bradford Area Public Library, the Friends of the Hanley Library and members of 11 local book groups.

The committee members read a multitude of books before deciding which one will be the focus of the Bradford community and provide life-long learning opportunities for those who participate.

The One Book Bradford committee is planning a series of events to complement the themes of the book. Those events will be announced at a later date.

“I really like the adventure. I like it a lot,” said One Book Bradford Chairwoman Pat Shinaberger. “This is a woman who was forced to be on her own several times.”

Shinaberger explained that the three carryover characters are like kids in our own neighborhood and this book gives the reader an opportunity to learn what they did when they became adults.

It also shows that people have many layers in their lives.

“We last knew Becky as a child. Now, she’s a mother,” Shinaberger said. “People have varied lives we don’t know about until we ask the questions.”

Hart's previous novels include “Waterwoman,” a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Authors award winner; “Ordinary Springs;” and “Black River.” Her other book-length works are “T. Rex at Swan Lake” (a picture book with Lisa Carrier), and “The Treasure of Savage Island,” a historical novel for young adults.

Hart has also published short fiction, nonfiction, reviews, and poetry in the U.S., Canada, and Norway. She’s received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at Mount San Angelo, and The Florida Fine Arts Council, and was given the Distinguished Alumni Award by Old Dominion University in 2006. Her work has been featured on Voice of America Radio, in Poets and Writers Magazine, and on the syndicated PBS series “Writer To Writer.”

Her next novel, “Nevermore” - a ghost story and literary romance – is set in 19th century Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. Edgar Allan Poe married his young cousin Virginia Clemm when he was 27 and she not yet 14. In “Nevermore” Virginia is the narrator who reveals what the 12 years spent as Poe's wife were like, and why she's come back at the hour of his death. Hart teaches in the MA/MFA Creative Writing program at Wilkes University in northeast Pennsylvania. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia with her husband, novelist and Bradford native David Poyer, and their daughter Naia.