Gentlehands

Gentlehands (1978) is a YA novel by M. E. Kerr. It was a nominee for the 1980 Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children’s Book Award, and it was re-released by HarperTeen in 2001. The story is about two teens from different classes falling in love. Buddy Boyle is the son of a sheriff, and Skye Pennington is the daughter of one of the town’s richest CEOs. They sometimes visit Buddy’s mysterious grandfather, a rich old man with a secret that a reporter tries to uncover. Ultimately, this is a coming-of-age story about family, first love, and deception.

The book opens with sixteen-year-old Buddy preparing to go on his first date with Skye. His parents caution him against it—Skye is beautiful and wealthy, whereas Buddy’s family scrapes by, and he himself works a part-time job at the Sweet Mouth Soda Shoppe. To impress her, he takes her to meet his estranged but wealthy maternal grandfather, Frank Trenker, who moved from Germany to New York ten years prior.

The next day, Buddy forgets to go clamming with his friend and his brother after work because Skye invites him to a pool party at her house. While there, he meets Skye’s mother, an avid spiritualist, and a reporter named Nick De Lucca, who is a guest of the Penningtons, and working on a secret project he refuses to talk about. When Buddy gets home, he lies to his parents and says he was working late and that it was too late to go clamming, so he went swimming with Skye instead. He chatters about how big and nice her house is, which embarrasses his parents. His father punches him after dinner when they are alone, calls him out on the lie, and then grounds him for two weeks. Buddy enlists his younger brother’s help to allow him to sneak out to see Skye Sunday. He promises Streaker a scavenger hunt and then asks his mother to lie for him and tell his father that he is home where he is supposed to be, which she refuses to do. The night takes a weird turn, when Skye and her friends tell anti-Semitic jokes and De Lucca reveals that he is Jewish, and that his cousin had been in the Auschwitz concentration camp, guarded by a man ironically called Gentlehands.



They escape the embarrassment by going to see Buddy’s grandfather. He tells them a story of a woman he loved in Cuba, who had loved birds and died tragically in a housefire. Buddy does not know how to respond to this, so he keeps drinking wine. At the end of the night, he is too drunk to go home, so he stays at Trenker’s, where he learns the story of his non-relationship with his wife and daughter. He had gotten a girl pregnant and married her because it was expected of him. She moved to America before the War and divorced him long-distance. At breakfast, he tells Buddy to work hard and stop blaming his parents for not having money, educate himself on culture, escort a lady home after a date, and never lie about where he’s been. It is good advice that goes completely over Buddy’s head.

Buddy and his mother fight about “snob things” and Buddy decides to move out and live with his grandfather. While he packs his things, he fights with his brother, calling Streaker a “parrot” because he repeats everything their father says. In truth, Buddy is a parrot as well, repeating things that his grandfather says even when he does not understand them, so Skye thinks he is smarter than he is. He finds out that Skye has been accepted into a good university in the fall, like her Ivy League brothers. He gets depressed at the thought that she was going to move on without him, and that their relationship had no future—which is what everyone had been telling him all along—and he goes and broods about it on the beach but has no solutions. His grandfather arrives home and tells Buddy that his mother is coming to dinner. Dinner is a tense affair; his grandfather is a well-traveled man of the world who used to deal in art and antiquities, whereas Buddy’s mother does not even know what Renaissance art is. His mother takes some time to relax, and all three have a bonding experience when they rescue a raccoon stuck in a trap.

After Skye and Buddy smoke pot and go to his grandfather’s house, she accidentally recounts a story about Gentlehands that she learned in confidence from De Lucca. Then she gets quiet and nervous and decides to leave. Buddy talks to his grandfather about De Lucca, who Trenker had already met that afternoon and who accused Trenker of being Gentlehands, which he denies. The next day, a newspaper article accusing Trenker of being a former SS officer at Auschwitz, the cruel Gentlehands, who sicced an attack dog on De Lucca’s teenaged cousin, and who liked torturing female prisoners. As soon as the story breaks, Buddy’s father collects him from work and makes him move back in with them whether he likes it or not. Again, he sneaks out to see Skye.



This time he is intercepted by her brother, who shows him the full article of proof that Trenker is a war criminal, and tells him to leave Skye alone, lest she be tainted by his influence. He goes to see his grandfather because he believes the stories are lies. Trenker gets death threats on the phone, and then someone kills his dog. He sends Buddy away for his safety, and then mails him a brief letter telling Buddy that he is going away. The letter also indirectly confirms his identity as Gentlehands. More newspapers emerge with photographic evidence. He begins to believe that he was wrong to stand by his grandfather, and he tips the authorities off to where Trenker is heading. They do not catch Trenker, but they do catch his partner in crime. The novel ends with Trenker on the loose, Buddy and Skye broken up, and Buddy mending his relationships with his family.

The end of the book includes a short autobiographical sketch of the author, as well as photographs of her, her friends and family.