Maybe it's just me...

I really enjoyed the beginning of this book as Nathan Filer has a good ear for making the narrator speak from inside the character's thoughts in a refreshingly simple and sing-song way. I liked the degree to which his view of people and events was off-kilter with the sensible adult's world. But this becomes a prison - as it does for the character himself and his real and imagined relationships. The intervention of official letters and dialogue with other characters doesn't really interrupt his internal dialogue and that ultimately makes this book, ironically, too one-dimensional an experience.

This is a highly rated book and I wondered if it was just me. Maybe I had something to fear from my own mental fragility in the face of this character's story. Certainly I struggled to empathise when he tells well-meaning helpers to f**k off and leave him alone. I know this happens to those trying to help all the time. So maybe it is just me that I gave up on the character at that point. But I didn't stop reading, I just stopped empathising.