Bud, Not Buddy

Ten year old Bud Caldwell is an orphan bouncing through Michigan foster homes during the depths of the Great Depression, and after a bad placement with the abusive Amos family turns violent, he runs away with almost nothing: a cardboard suitcase, a few flyers advertising a jazz bandleader named Herman E. Calloway, and his own list of self written rules for having what he calls a funner life. Bud has convinced himself, on thin evidence, that Calloway is his father, and he sets out walking and hitching from Flint toward Grand Rapids to find him, picking up help along the way from strangers including Lefty Lewis, a kind stranger who feeds him and drives him partway, and a group of men living in a hobo encampment who share what little they have.

When Bud finally reaches Calloway and his band, the truth turns out to be both smaller and larger than what Bud imagined: Calloway is not his father at all but his grandfather, the estranged father of Bud's own mother, Angela Janet, who has since died. The reveal reframes everything Bud has been chasing, and rather than the father he invented, he gains a real family, a band willing to take him in, and a grandfather who, once he understands who Bud actually is, chooses to keep him. The novel closes with Bud settled among the musicians, his made up rules for survival finally set aside for an actual home.

Curtis writes Bud's voice with real comic timing even inside a story about poverty, racism, and abandonment, and the running gag of Bud's numbered rules for living gives the book a light touch that never undercuts how hard his circumstances actually are. It reads fast, funny scene by scene even while the underlying story stays genuinely serious about what Black families endured during the Depression.