First Boy by Gary Schmidt

 Cooper lives on a dairy farm with his grandfather.  He never knew his parents and his grandmother passed away several months ago.  Then, one morning, his grandfather doesn't get up to milk the cows.  Cooper finds that he has died peacefully in his sleep.  Now 15-year-old Cooper is all alone with nothing but his cows to keep him company.  He vows to keep up on the farm, but soon his grades and his performance on track team start to slip.  His heroic effort to keep things going catches the attention of a smarmy political figure who tries to recruit Cooper to be the poster boy for his campaign.  When Cooper refuses, bad things start happening on the farm.  A man shows up claiming to know Cooper's real parents, but Cooper isn't tempted by his promises of a cushy life in the lap of luxury.  All he really wants is to take care of his cows.

 Gary Schmidt has written some of my favorite all-time middle grade books.  This one is also pretty good, but I didn't like it as much as Schmidt's later books,  OK for Now or Pay Attention, Carter Jones. Schmidt is really good at writing about kids working through tough situations with the support of caring adults.  I think that is what makes his books so appealing to me.  In this book I loved Cooper's single minded attachment to his farm, and this quirky but supportive neighbors.  I also liked the fact that (spoiler alert) the author left the real identity of his parents ambiguous in the end.  It wasn't about a kid finding his parents, it was about a kid finding "family."  I think the reason that it didn't have the emotional impact of the other two later books is that the storyline was so improbable.  I didn't feel like I was reading about the life of a real person; like any town would have kids going through what Cooper was going through.  That's was what made OK for Now and Pay Attention, Carter Jones so touching. (224 p. 2007)