Savvy

Pastor Meeks orders new Bibles, but the delivery company sends him two large boxes of Bibles bound in pink. Meeks blows his top and scolds deliveryman Lester Swan as if it’s all Lester’s fault. The delivery of the Bibles during the birthday party and the resulting chaos in the church office offer Mibs and her companions a plot-changing chance to escape the dismal affair and travel to the hospital where Mibs’s father lies comatose.

Bibles usually are a sign of solace and certainty. As the kids travel on the bus, though, they’re surrounded by boxes of Bibles that begin to scatter and skid across the floor in disarray. This symbolizes the chaos of the journey, the confusion in Mibs’s mind, and the collapse of her old certainties.

The Bibles become symbols of how good things that contain strange attributes—a pink Bible or a child with a weird superpower—can be rejected by others. They also lay bare the failings of Pastor Meeks, whose angry reaction suggests not a kindly man of the cloth but a self-important petty functionary. The pastor’s huffy hectoring becomes a satire of religious leaders who focus on appearance instead of inner spirit.

With Mibs’s father in a coma and her mom attending him, the girl’s birthday party gets commandeered by the self-important Miss Rosemary, who arranges to have local kids show up at the church for the celebration. The kids there hardly know Mibs and attend mainly to eat birthday cake and play. It’s the worst way for a Beaumont child to celebrate a 13th birthday because of the savvy that will erupt from them on that day. Mibs begins experiencing her superpower at the party and faints from the surprise. Meanwhile, a delivery of pink Bibles has Pastor Meeks in a snit, chaos erupts in the church office, and the party quickly deteriorates.

The birthday party represents the huge disconnect between the Beaumonts, a loving family with strange abilities, and the locals, dominated by the persnickety, uptight Meeks family.

Somewhere near the center of the US, on the sparsely populated, flat borderlands between Nebraska and Kansas, lies a small amount of property created by Mibs’s Grandpa Bomba—his savvy is moving and stretching land—where the Beaumont family can exercise their powers without causing too much trouble. It is “well beyond hollering distance from the nearest neighbor, which [i]s the best place to be for a family like [theirs]” (3). Narrator Mibs says their home is “just off Highway 81” (3), not far from the town of Hebron, Nebraska, population 1,440. Nearby villages are spaced about 10 miles apart; in between are vast square miles of plains and cornfields.

The towns and geography of the region are real places; only Kansaska-Nebransas is fictional. Early each week, the family calls the place “Kansaska” in honor of its borderline location; later in the week, they reverse the nickname to “Nebransas” to give equal time to both states. The Beaumont property represents the power of the family’s magic; its humorous, unofficial name suggests a clan of bright, creative people who want to be hard to pin down and feel deeply ambivalent about becoming too involved with nearby communities.

Scumbling is a type of glaze that artists use to soften their paintings. The Beaumonts use the term differently: Scumble means managing or suppressing one’s savvy. Every Beaumont “ha[s] to learn to scumble— to use [their] savvy or work around it” (123). Grandpa Bomba had long since mastered his ability to create land, and he uses it to make fresh acreage for the Beaumonts. Fish, who can cause weather storms, learns how to scumble their winds precisely to move objects at will. His older brother, Rocket, still struggles with his power over electricity, and his solution is to move to Wyoming, farther away from populations and their fragile power grids.

Much of Savvy concerns Mibs’s efforts to scumble her power. It’s mostly only her mind-reading ability that causes her distress, but that’s enough to interfere with her ability to get along with others. Quickly, though, she learns how to ignore the noise of other humans' thoughts, avoid rooms filled with tattooed people, and use her new power to help others in distress. As with her siblings, it’s a work in progress, but she makes great strides right away.

Scumble is also the name of the second book in the Savvy series.