April Morning by Howard Fast
April Morning by Howard Fast“When I turned back to the house, my father called after me and asked me did I figure I was finished. “I figure so,” I said, and then my father said, in that way he has of saying something that cuts you down to half of your size or less:
“Slow to start and quick to finish.”
So went the character Adam about his life, and so went the book, April Morning, by Howard Fast.
Throughout the book, an underlying theme of starting a task slowly and finishing the task quickly. The character Adam is slow to start his chores, but quick to finish his responsibilities; Adam’s father, Moses Cooper is slow to begin to let his son try and prove himself as a man, but Moses is deadly quick to finish that process, literally; the beginning of the American Revolutionary war is slow to start on April 19, 1775, but the battle at Lexington Green is over in a matter of minutes; and as a whole, the book April Morning is slow to start, but ends in the period of one day.
Adam Cooper is a boy of fifteen, who wants nothing more than to feel loved and respected as “young man” instead of a “boy” by his father. He receives his chance and receives his father’s affection for the “first” and last time the morning of April 19, 1775, the day the British Army marched to Lexington Green where his father perished in the “first” battle of the American Revolutionary war. With the death of his father, Adam is literally turned into a man during the course of the day. As a boy, Adam runs as soon as the first shot is fired on the Green, which is the shot that kills his father, and he hides in a smokehouse and cries for hours before gaining the courage to run away from the British army and the town in which he lives. As a man, Adam helps the Revolutionary cause to fight the British all day long as they march down Menotomy Road to and from Concord. Adam cracks the door to “manhood” by signing the muster book at dawn; by dusk he has stepped through and slammed the door behind him.
Moses Cooper has always maintained that his eldest son, Adam, was a dreamy, fool-hearted, and immature boy. Moses begins to see that his son is becoming a “man” when Adam steps up to sign...
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