I knew you would.
Is it strange that I am describing a book about a dead teen restricted for fifty years to an afterlife reserved exclusively for thirteen year old Americans as just as peppy as The Periodic Table of the Elements Song? (Although perhaps anything set to the tune of I Am The Very Model of a Model Major General would be peppy. Let someone record Eichmann In Jerusalem to it and we’ll see.) Of course, this comparison is set off by the fact that Oliver, the protagonist and ghostly spiritual successor to Christopher from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has memorized the periodic table of the elements and the chapter headings are each little element boxes from the chart. But I stand by my peppiness. We have a surprisingly peppy novel.
Now I’ve looked up peppy in a thesaurus because I should probably move onto another adjective, but I don’t like any of the synonyms listed. Pep. A novel that should be as dour as not allowing yourself to kill yourself until your dead son’s cat dies is almost life-affirming instead. It’s kind of odd. Or amazing. Or odazing (my new portmanteau!). But basically, whatever it is, it works really well as a novel. The third (I never know to divide books into acts the way fancy reviewers do, so I’ll just say from around page 259 in my copy of 292 pages, which is a relatively useless measure to anyone not with my kobo) act falters slightly, knocking us down from five to four and a half stars, but that’s hardly a strike against a first novel. I’m sure Neil Smith is hardly going to shed tears because unknown-me knocked half a star off. I can’t even write my first novel. His first novel gets an A+, with a big gold sticker since he doesn’t drag out the revelations all to the end so he can have a big bang, shocked you senseless, who cares about all the character development, ending. It’s a progression that trusts the reader to keep going. I like it when writers trust me enough to let me be and don’t spend their time trying to fool me unnecessarily. Each new piece of information is unexpected but expected both. My kobo notes at the front give my guess as to what happened. They were right. But I didn’t mind as it all rolled out. I enjoyed finding out the plot.
Plus it looked like someone actually tried to make the ePub look pretty, rather than just ran a Word file through a converter. A nice change for once.
Boo by Neil Smith went on sale May 19, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.