Gary D. Schmidt tells a tale of an eighth grader's healing and discovery through art. WE slip conventionally enough into "Okay for Now" when a city kid behind a whole rack of metaphorical eight balls heads to a new school in a Catskill backwater. He's Douglas Swieteck, an eighth grader last seen in Gary D. Schmidt's much praised "Wednesday Wars," to which this book plays sequel, though it very much stands on its own. In the literature of outsiders, Doug is as far out there as any. He's troubled by his two brothers: one a bully, the other absent. When the coach divides his gym class into shirts and skins, Doug has a truly horrifying reason that he can't run around gym class without a shirt, courtesy of a father who is almost too horrible to be believed. And, oh yes, he has a reading disability. But beneath the jumble of tragedy and tragicomedy is a story about the healing power of art and about a boy's intellectual awakening. The healing begins in a room at the top of the public library, where an enormous book under glass, Audubon's "Birds of America," lies open lo a picture of a falling bird. "It was the most terrifying picture I had ever seen. The most beautiful." Doug traces the lines of the bird - wings, beak and frightened eye - on the fogging glass. Then he steals the card that identifies it as an Arctic tern. Happily, Doug lives in a world where an unhappy boy in desperate need of guidance is passed from one nurturing adult to the next, beginning with the elderly librarian, Mr. Powell. who reaches past Doug's defenses to teach him how to draw the birds that have moved him so. Meanwhile, as Doug studies "Jane Eyre" in English class, Charlotte Brontë's diction begins to seep into his vocabulary, just as Audubon's birds seep into his soul. Next he takes up Aaron Copland. This is a kid who once counted as his sole hero the Yankees' Joe Pepitene. "Okay for Now" is crowded with more incident and empowerment than any eighth-grade year or novel can quite contain. Events stretch credulity. At one point, Doug turns up briefly on the Broadway stage, playing a female role, no less. But Schmidt is a master of the unlikely. Most of the narrative revolves around a quest. Doug has to help preserve Audubon's great book when it becomes an endangered species itself, as the town council begins to sell off individual plates. The story takes place in 1968, with Doug's family driving their pickup down to Port Authority to collect a brother, home from Vietnam. But centered on lives badly balanced on the ragged edge of survival and uprooted by poverty, with a distant war rumbling in the background, inaudible to some people, deafening to others, this is a novel that could easily have been set in the present. '"You folks waiting for a kid in a wheelchair?'" the bus driver asks. "'No,' said my father." But it turns out they are. They then have to navigate Doug's older brother, who has lost both his eyesight and his legs, through the angry crowd of an antiwar rally. I read it all through misting eyes. Flirting with despair on its way to affirmation, "Okay for Now" is about how one kid, among legions, has to reach beyond his family for help from the other adults in his life to give him a hand. "You know what it feels like," Doug says to his wounded brother and Mr. Powell, "to stroke color onto an Arctic tern flying off the page, going wherever he wants to go?" "Terrific." And so is this book.