Or is the menace just inside him?Ī masterly tale of life and death, hopes and fears, secrets and lies.īritisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.Ĭhristopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. Hobson is in total control of his material, letting Sequoyah relax into the welcoming Troutt family home while glimpsing the menace behind the curtain. “Why did the entire town seem to have the same strange habits?” Sequoyah wonders.
As in a Shirley Jackson story, everything seems perfectly ordinary until it doesn’t. Hobson ( Desolation of Avenues Untold, 2015, etc.) writes in a spare, even tone, and no matter what Sequoyah says-even when it’s about feeling dead inside, or about wanting to hurt someone-the reader is with him, empathizing. Sequoyah used to get in trouble at the shelter for slipping out at night to take walks, so he fit right into this house full of secrets and relative freedom. They lived in rural Oklahoma, and the quiet suited them all the Troutts were kind people, and everyone in the house liked to be by themselves a lot, with Agnes going for drives, Harold napping in the basement where he surprisingly ran an illegal bookie shop, George lying on his bed meditating, and Rosemary heading to the woods with a drawing pad. “I have been unhappy for many years now,” he begins, then tells the story of how his mother went to jail on a drug charge and, after a stint at a shelter, he wound up living with the Troutts, Harold and Agnes, and their two other foster kids, the eccentric George, 13, who was prone to sleepwalking, and 17-year-old Rosemary, who shared Sequoyah’s Native American heritage and liked to talk about death. That’s no spoiler: Sequoyah tells us about Rosemary’s death within three sentences of the start of his tale. A man looks back on 1989, the year he was 15, when he was living in a foster home and a girl who was also living there died in front of him.
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