I requested this book from NetGalley and was kindly
sent an e-book of it for review.
I think what interested me most in this title was the
fact that it got compared to “Wonder” by RJ Palacio (which I haven’t read but
people have been raving about it for quite some time) and “The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon (which I read many years ago back
in secondary school and I remember it blew my mind then).
What this book has in common with those two above is
the main character who is a teenage boy with a serious medical condition. In
this case, Alex suffers from cancer and epilepsy. They both influence his
appearance and his behavior in a way that makes him not the most popular boy in
school to say the least (even though he does have some… well, ‘friends’ would
probably be pushing it too far).
He is also extremely bright and does exceptionally
well in school, and it also shows in his narrative. It’s first person and what
you probably could call stream of consciousness, which in itself surely could
hinder the enjoyment of reading for some people, but excessive use of brackets
certainly did just that (at least for me). I found the writing style somewhat
irritating and I think that was the reason why I didn’t enjoy the book. The
choice of this specific narrative style could in my opinion be blamed for
underdeveloped characters and unengaging plot. It also required a lot of suspension
of disbelief on my part to appreciate Alex as the narrator – even if he really
was a child prodigy.
I can’t say I’m a fan of this book, unfortunately. I
also think it requires a lot of skill and empathy to write about children
suffering from cancer, and it requires a lot more to make them narrators. In
this case, at least for me, the whole idea backfired, but maybe the concept was
too much to handle in a debut.
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