April Book Report: Ferrol Sams’ When All the World Was Young

This novel is the third in a pleasing trilogy about a boy growing up in rural Georgia in the interwar period.  Published in 1991, When All the World Was Young is the third and final novel in Sams’ series about Porter Osbourne, Junior, the only son of a Southern family.

I first read these semi-autobiographical novels almost 30 years ago, when I was living in Nashville.  I loved these stories then, both for the vivid details of Southern life in the interwar period and for the splendid writing.  Sams was a physician by training but he was also a lover of literature and poetry, an affection that shows in the novels.  There is humor to spare, joy in family, and a keen sense of the fleeting feel of childhood.  I read them well before I had JT and have read them since then.

These books were among those I thought of and re-read when I became the parent of a boy.  This fall, as that boy headed off to college, I picked up the series again, finishing When All the World Was Young just a few weeks before JT comes home from his first year of college.  

This third novel begins just as WWII has broken out and Porter, a precocious young man who completed college at the age of 20, enrolls in medical school and contemplates his future.  School is a challenge, but not nearly the challenge of Porter’s desire to do his part on behalf of the war.  Ultimately, medical school is placed on hold and Porter joins the army.  He dreams of being a brave paratrooper but instead serves as a medic, ultimately working in hospitals along the front line in Normandy and Germany at the close of the European front.

I enjoyed the read, as I have done before, and was struck again by how splendidly Sams writes. He invokes a place and time so thoroughly that the reader is immersed in them.  The character of Porter is alive in all the complexities of youth, filled with certainty in one moment and adrift in the next.  When I put the book down at the end of the day, I found myself thinking about Porter and his family.  I expect that feeling will linger well after I’ve turned the last page.  To me, that's the power of a good book.  And this was a terrifically good book.