Full of spoilers
There are different kinds of pleasures in books. As I read for escape, I throw my nets widely, as whatever I read, it will STILL be escape from my life (well, unless I would write an autobiography, I guess. Reading THAT would probably not be an escape).
Anyway, from one side "Boy's Life" was something I did not enjoy very much. I have read enough about the period it covers not to find much that was new data for me, from one side, and, from other side, in small details that can make a connection, spur nostalgia and open the heart of the reader, the book described a too different world from the one where I grew up.
As for plot - and plot CAN make even a fluffy book inviting - there WAS one, yet it was so weighed down with all the details around that it seems, looking back, as though the book was one long wandering in nostalgic mist.
Yet, while I ended up checking the themes one expects in fiction about a boy - boy and his father, boy and his dog, boy and his bicycle, I also found the sheer MAGIC amusing. And, for me, this WAS something that WAS similar in the Soviet childhood - the wish to catch a Nazi war criminal!
In the end, this juvenile greediness described was what made me want to write about the book - I know the feeling of wanting to be an actor in everything dramatic one has learned about. To catch a Nazi war criminal, to know personally someone who has experienced slavery (the character the boy meets has be 106 years old for that, but who cares!), to fight and to drive away a monster!
For me, when I was the mental age of the hero of the book, it seemed that the issue of slavery in USA was being dealt with, but I was obsessed about the fate of Native Americans, for example. And, may-be, that was also what confused me about the boy - he was interested in what had happened in Europe, he thought about slavery ... yet he did not obsess about the Native people on whose land he and his family were living. Why? OK, there was a friend with collection of arrow heads, but if there was anything about the descendants of the people who had made these arrowheads, I did miss it.