Tom Slade, Boy Scout

Volume 1 in the Tom Slade Series

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh. Edited by Karen L. Black
Norton Creek Press, ISBN 0981928404. 156 pages.

“Tom Slade, Boy Scout” is the first volume of the Bridgeboro Series, a forgotten gem of American fiction. Written in 1915 when the Boy Scout movement was new, the book glows with the freshness of the movement and the optimism of an age when everything seemed possible.

Young Tom Slade is a latter-day Huck Finn, always in trouble. Everyone expects him to grow up to be as worthless as his father. Connover Bennett is a latter-day Little Lord Fauntleroy, whose sheltered upbringing leaves him without skills or sense. What will it take to make something out of this unpromising material? A miracle not being available, the task falls to the Bridgeboro Scouts.

Percy Keese Fitzhugh wrote dozens of Bridgeboro Scouts novels, including nineteen Tom Slade books. The main characters are based on real people, giving the books an authenticity unusual in juvenile fiction (or any fiction). The self-reliant boys are reminiscent of the heroes in Robert A. Heinlein’s early fiction (not surprising because both authors’ work was serialized in “Boys Life”).

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