THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES, by Kate Messner
It’s become a familiar refrain: Boys today are struggling. They’re getting in trouble and falling behind in the classroom. They’re more likely to feel socially excluded; they have difficulty forming real-world connections.
One possible reason is that boys are caught in a moment of cultural transition. When they look at their fathers and grandfathers — especially in working-class families like mine — they often see men who appear stronger, tougher, more stoic than they are; and they feel inferior. At the same time, much of the current conversation around masculinity focuses on its toxicity. This paradox leaves many boys confused.
But here’s the frustrating part: Much of this confusion could be eased if boys had access to the complex inner lives of the men they look up to. The real problem is a lack of communication, a failure of emotional transparency.
In “The Trouble With Heroes,” Kate Messner’s wonderful new novel in verse, 13-year-old Finn Connelly is in crisis. He’s trying to process the sudden loss of his distant, first-responder father: “When I think about Dad/I remember him gone —/off fighting fires,/rescuing everybody but us.” Because of incomplete schoolwork, he’s in danger of failing seventh grade. And now he’s facing vandalism charges after being caught on video kicking over the tombstone of the local legend Edna Grace Thomas — one of the first women to climb all 46 Adirondack High Peaks, and a longtime “corresponding secretary” for the Adirondack 46ers. (Hikers who wanted to be 46ers wrote Edna a letter after each climb they completed, and she responded with words of encouragement.)
While Finn is at his lowest point, his main make-up assignment, ironically, is to draft a collection of poems about heroes. His teacher even suggests he write about his father, who, more than 20 years earlier, on Sept. 11, was captured in an award-winning photo carrying a wounded survivor out of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. “Yeah./Maybe not,” Finn fires back in what he titles “Introductory Poem for the Stupid Poetry Project.” How can he write about his heroic father when he feels like such a disappointment?
But then he catches a break. Rather than press charges, Edna’s daughter offers Finn an alternative path to make things right. Over the course of the summer, he must fulfill the goal her mother hoped to achieve before she died: to summit those same 46 High Peaks again, with her dog, Seymour.
Finn reluctantly agrees, kicking off a three-month journey of self-discovery that tests him both physically and emotionally.
His initial hike is a bust. He doesn’t pack the right equipment. He wears the wrong footwear. He foolishly starts with the highest peak instead of getting his “mountain legs” on easier trails.
He learns his lesson the hard way: “Sometimes when you climb mountains/there are mountains in the way/and you have to climb those mountains/before you get to the mountain/you were trying to climb in the first place.” Gradually, Finn begins to embrace his summer of “climbing out of trouble,” recognizing it as a metaphor to explore in his poetry.
One of the most satisfying through lines in the book follows the often touching interactions he has with a small rotation of “trail nannies,” experienced hikers who have volunteered to accompany Finn on his climbs. Messner does a beautiful job of slowly unfolding these poignant encounters, most notably with his dad’s old hockey coach. His conversations with “Coach” are sparse and sometimes guarded, but eventually the two connect. In a way, Coach becomes a stand-in for Finn’s father, offering a chance at healing.
An enthusiastic baker, Finn avoided the kitchen when his dad was alive, acknowledging that his cooking apron didn’t square with his father’s idea of boyhood. When Coach eats one of Finn’s cookies on the trail, however, and later suggests he bring more “in case you need me to taste test before you open a famous bakery,” something unlocks inside Finn, and his baking skills become central to both his identity and the story itself.
Another notable thread is the role the natural world plays in Finn’s confidence. Instead of sitting in the house brooding, he’s out in the fresh air, pushing himself physically, finding space to reflect on his grief, his guilt and his future. Sometimes he stumbles, or has to wait out a storm, but his successes are genuinely moving: “The view goes on forever/all white-cloud perfect sky,/pine-tree green and/purple-mountain blue.” Messner, an experienced Adirondack 46er herself, brilliantly evokes both the mountainous landscape and the serenity that can be found in nature.
But the most powerful turn in the novel comes when Finn discovers that his father was one of the hikers who corresponded with Edna. It turns out he, too, had been trying to climb all the High Peaks.
Edna’s responses to his father’s letters (which Finn finds in a box at the back of his mother’s closet), and later the original letters themselves, provide him with a unique glimpse of the inner life of a man who seemed unreachable. Though Finn opts not to reveal everything contained in these letters, we get the sense that they’ve given him exactly what he needs. And in a final inversion, ordinary Finn Connelly cooks up a way to help his heroic father accomplish something he was never able to pull off on his own.
“The Trouble With Heroes” is a timely, enduring story that reminds us that even the toughest fathers carry emotions worth sharing. What a gift it would be if more boys, and more young people in general, had access to our vulnerability.
THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES | By Kate Messner | (Ages 9 and up) | Bloomsbury | 368 pp. | $17.99
