2/5
Review:
Not for me
I'm afraid I don't think this is as good most people seem
to. It has its merits but I thought it
was pretty badly flawed.
The main protagonist is Milo, a young
boy with retinitis pigmentosa which means he has vision effectively in a small pinhole. Milo is an earnest, incredibly good-hearted
boy who lives with his mother and his great-grandmother, whom he looks after
until she moves into a Care Home, leaving him to get to the bottom of and sort
out poor treatment in the home, the tribulations of various residents, the
problems of a Syrian refugee who is an illegal immigrant, his mother's
incipient depression, his parents' divorce and reconciliation, problems at
school…and a few other things, too.
I found this one of the book's problems – it tackles far too
much, making it both implausible and rather convoluted. We get narratives from four points of view,
which is too many, and the prose was very one-paced. It needed a variety of tone and rhythm, and
cried out for some real humour which Hamlet the pig didn't really provide for
me. The whole thing just went on too
long and I found the ending, which was intended to be a Wonder-style triumph, a
bit obvious and saccharine.
I also worry that Milo's visual
impairment seemed to have very little real bearing on the plot or anything else. Much of the time it simply isn't important or
even mentioned when it should be important, and gave me the impression of
having just been bolted on to give the book a sympathetic aura. Books like the excellent She Is Not Invisible
by Marcus Sedgwick show how this can be done with real depth, empathy and
humour; retinitis pigmentosa is a serious and important topic, but its presence
here felt rather manipulative to me.
I'm sorry to be so critical.
Others have enjoyed this far more than I did and didn't find the same
flaws in it so don't be put off, but I can't, in all honesty, recommend this.
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