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Perfect by Rachel Joyce – 400 pages
Book Blurb:
On a foggy spring morning in 1972, twelve-year-old Byron Hemming and his mother are driving to school in the English countryside. On the way, in a life-changing two seconds, an accident occurs. Or does it? Byron is sure it happened, but his mother, sitting right next to him in the car, has no reaction to it. Over the course of the days and weeks that follow, Byron embarks on a journey to discover what really happened-or didn’t-that fateful morning when everything changed. It is a journey that will take him-a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy with a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy’s perspective on life-into the murkier, more difficult realities of the adult world, where adults lie, fathers and mothers fight without words, and even unwilling boys must become men. By the end, Byron will finally reconcile the dueling realities of that summer, a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit and the power of compassion.
My review: 3 stars
I enjoyed this book and the satirical look at being “perfect” for this family in the English countryside. With the parental figures more interested in keeping appearances rather than raising their kids, the book turns into an odd set of circumstances that keeps one parent hiding imperfections from the other. All this takes its toll on an undiagnosed OCD child and ultimately ends his only friendship.
There is much intrigue in this book and an even bigger mystery that takes place in the future as the reader is made to guess the identity of that voice. The book was a little too long for me and I felt myself rushing to the end.
Quotes I liked:
He told himself not to think about the accident, but not thinking took so much space it was the same as thinking about it all the time.”
– “Although your father is a very clever man, of course. Much more clever than me. I’ve never finished a book from start to finish. — “You read magazines, cookery books.”—“Yes but they have pictures. Clever books only have words.”
– “She’s a friend of a friend and she’s going to give Jim an introductory session for free. Apparently she is awesome. She does all sorts of things including phobia therapy. She even does parties. She’s been fully trained online.”
– “It was the same with time, he thought, and also sorrow. They were both waiting to catch you. And no matter how much you shook your arms at them and hollered, they knew they were bigger. They knew they would get you in the end.”
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