Despite a number of excellent reviews, I found this very difficult to digest. At first, it reminded me of Emma Donohue’s The Room, as it begins with a child hidden away in some sort of closet or room. At other times, it reminded me of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker as it too is written in a mixture of dialect and phonetic spellings (of a child born into a post nuclear holocaust world). In The Room, the voice of the child as he struggled to understand his own version of Plato’s cave convinced. In Riddley Walker, the eccentric spellings of a child trying to make sense of a world devastated by nuclear war engaged. In The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean, the combination of the child’s voice and the odd spellings did not add to any sense of verisimilitude, merely detracted from the story and created unnecessary distance between reader (this one, anyway) and protagonist. In sum, this book has had great reviews, so it may simply be a matter of the book not being everyone’s cup of tea.
At first, I was not particularly taken by the main character, Angie, as she spilled all her teenage angst over a little statue of St. Felix. However, once the statue came to life, in a magical moment of ‘magical realism’, the novel seemed to find its voice. What I took for the ramblings of a spoilt middle-class American teenager became an energetic story that managed to combine the difficulties of starting and maintaining positive human relationships in a world that is complicated by war (for Angie and her love interest, Jesse), religion (for her mother and step-father) and the primordial demands of the ego and id that their needs be met. The book takes the reader on a journey which leaves them feeling a little more human, a little more in tune with our struggle to love well and be loved in a tough world. St. Felix becomes a synecdoche for that struggle, occupying a wobbly space between sainthood and humanity, reality and fantasy, reader and novel.
My winner is What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay
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