Bud, Not Buddy
Christopher Paul Curtis (1999)
“A ten-year-old orphan boy runs across Depression-era Michigan armed with a suitcase of flyers, a set of rules for survival, and the stubborn belief that a jazz bandleader is his father.”
At a Glance
It's 1936, Flint, Michigan. Ten-year-old Bud Caldwell has been bounced through the foster care system since his mother died four years ago. After a brutal placement with the Amoses and a night in the shed with a killer hornets' nest, Bud escapes and sets off on foot for Grand Rapids, convinced that jazz musician Herman E. Calloway is his father — based on nothing but a set of old flyers his mother kept. What Bud finds at the end of the road is not exactly what he expected, but it turns out to be exactly what he needed: a found family, a history, and a name to claim.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Bud, Not Buddy won both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award in 2000 — only the second book in history to win both in the same year (the first was Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry). It remains one of the most widely taught middle-school novels in the United States, particularly for its treatment of the Great Depression, the African American experience, and family as chosen rather than given.
Diction Profile
Highly informal first-person narration — Bud's voice is child-vernacular with moments of unintended wisdom and inadvertent poetry
Moderate