LitPick Review
For the past few years, Ben's mother has been growing steadily stranger. She talks of lizards dressed as people, who hate the color red and can only be identified by a seam in the back of their mouths. She has even gone so far as to attack people in searching for the proof that they are lizards bent on destroying the human race, and has been hospitalized quite a few times. And now Ben's father has walked out- so what's a seventeen year old boy to do when left to take care of a crazy woman? But that's when Ben meets Marco, who claims to have just moved in and have an ill mother himself. This arouses Ben's curiosity, and he eagerly befriends the strange older boy. Marco has a problem, and Ben thinks that he might be able to help- but he never expected that the problem would involve a story about wormholes in oak trees and a civilization two thousand years in the future, and Ben certainly hadn't predicted that Marco's story would strangely mirror his own life.
Opinion:
I expected to love this book. But, to begin with, I wasn't so sure. The writing style is juvenile and awkward, and I found the protagonist boring and hard to relate to (he is solely described as a fly fishing wrestler with a crush on his best friend's older sister.) Marco's story seemed out of place, and was so much more interesting than the rest of the book that I wished that Ben's life would stop butting in. However, as the book went on it got more interesting, and I realized that, somehow, I had begun enjoying it! Though the beginning drags and the prose is annoying, the story is worth reading for its insightful exploration of mental illness and its intriguing combination of time travel and realistic fiction. Overall, while this book is nothing amazing, it is certainly a worthwhile read for science fiction readers or fans of Charlie Price's first book.
