The delicious villain of “Tumble & Blue” is a mystical golden alligator who lurks in the swamp outside town and delivers asides to the reader in a velvety, malign purr. His dark menace is foil to the pure hearts of Blue Montgomery and Tumble Wilson, the winning duo of Cassie Beasley’s charming, warm-hearted and richly imagined tale.
Blue and Tumble have each been brought by their parents against their will to the poky town of Murky Branch, Ga., a town so small that Tumble thinks it could “bore the heroism right out of her.” But Tumble is an eternal optimist: “Her parents had taken her life and given it a good hard shake, but that didn’t mean Tumble was going to fall to pieces.” Dead set on being a hero and inspired by the incantatory slogans of the infomercial celebrity Maximal Star, Tumble is undeterred even when every rescue she attempts ends in disaster. “I prefer,” she says upon meeting Blue, “to think of myself as potentially extraordinary.”
Blue, on the other hand, is usually blue. The victim of a generations-old family curse, he just can’t win at anything — spelling bees, video games, sports, fights — and is gloomy after being recently dumped at his grandmother’s house by his constitutionally impatient racecar-driver father. Then Tumble catapults in, a breath of fresh air, zealously intent on saving Blue.
As droves of eccentric, meddlesome relatives turn up to wait for a red moon to rise, when all will be called into the swamp to fulfill or contest fates handed down long ago, only the courage to face truths about themselves — truths as dark as the swamp itself — will save Blue and Tumble. In places the story staggers under the weight of unwieldy plot mechanics and gratuitous emotional explication. But these are flaws of exuberance, and it’s hard to dwell on them while you’re rooting for characters as disarming as these two.
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