Liar and Spy, by Rebecca Stead (Audiobook)
Audiobook. I liked the narrator.
Stead wrote an excellent, complex children’s novel, When You Reach Me
, which won the Newbery Award. Her follow-up, Liar & Spy
, is similarly structured, with a lot of seemingly disconnected subplots which fit together into a thematically consistent whole with all mysteries solved.
Georges is a 12-year-old boy who’s having a very bad year. He’s being bullied at school, and his architect father was laid off, forcing the family to sell their beloved house and move to an apartment. His mother, a nurse, has to take so many double shifts at the hospital that Georges literally doesn’t see her for days, and is forced to communicate with her via leaving messages spelled out in Scrabble tiles.
However, he meets a boy his age, Safer, at his new apartment. Safer, who is home-schooled, has a charmingly eccentric family (his siblings are named Pigeon and Candy), and Georges finds a refuge both in Safer’s home and in getting trained as a spy. But Safer and Georges’ spy games become more and more intense, and Georges worries that Safer’s obsession with spying on a man living in the apartment may be getting out of control. (I will tell you now that this story does not involve child abuse, which I did wonder about at one point. Also, the man is not a Holocaust survivor, which also occurred to me as the most maudlin possible outcome.)
This summary, by the way, leaves out multiple subplots involving a Seurat painting, the chemistry experiment of True Love and Doom, a wild parrot nest, and an overly peppy PE teacher. There is an impressive amount of material packed into a short space, without seeming rushed or incoherent. I enjoyed this a lot - it’s funny, well-written, and clever - up to a certain point.
I didn’t think this one worked quite as well as When You Reach Me - the bulk of the story was wonderful, but I had some issues with the ending revelations and outcome. They were cleverly set up, but opened up large cans of worms in terms of characterization and plausibility.
Huge spoilers for entire book below cut.
It took me a surprisingly long time to notice that Safer never left the apartment building, possibly because I listened to the audiobook over a period of two weeks.
Once the penny dropped, I couldn’t get past the fact that his agoraphobia was controlling his entire life and affecting his whole family, and yet his caring and educated parents had apparently never taken him to a therapist. It only needed one or two lines to fix that, like, “My parents repeatedly dragged me to therapists, but I absolutely refused to cooperate, and finally the therapists said they couldn’t do anything until I was ready.” Especially since agoraphobia is extremely treatable, and what Georges does with him to work on it is almost exactly what a therapist would have done.
Similarly, Georges’ parents seemed so sensible and loving that it seemed incredible that they would just let it slide and not even attempt to discuss the fact that he was in total denial about his mom’s condition, was refusing to visit or call her, and all communications with her had to be passed on via Scrabble tiles. Especially since it sounded like her life was in danger.
The revelation that did work well for me and felt plausible was the mislead in which Georges and the reader are led to believe that Safer is taking the game way too seriously, when actually Georges is the one who’s doing that.
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1121096.html. Comment here or there.
Stead wrote an excellent, complex children’s novel, When You Reach Me
, which won the Newbery Award. Her follow-up, Liar & Spy
, is similarly structured, with a lot of seemingly disconnected subplots which fit together into a thematically consistent whole with all mysteries solved.
Georges is a 12-year-old boy who’s having a very bad year. He’s being bullied at school, and his architect father was laid off, forcing the family to sell their beloved house and move to an apartment. His mother, a nurse, has to take so many double shifts at the hospital that Georges literally doesn’t see her for days, and is forced to communicate with her via leaving messages spelled out in Scrabble tiles.
However, he meets a boy his age, Safer, at his new apartment. Safer, who is home-schooled, has a charmingly eccentric family (his siblings are named Pigeon and Candy), and Georges finds a refuge both in Safer’s home and in getting trained as a spy. But Safer and Georges’ spy games become more and more intense, and Georges worries that Safer’s obsession with spying on a man living in the apartment may be getting out of control. (I will tell you now that this story does not involve child abuse, which I did wonder about at one point. Also, the man is not a Holocaust survivor, which also occurred to me as the most maudlin possible outcome.)
This summary, by the way, leaves out multiple subplots involving a Seurat painting, the chemistry experiment of True Love and Doom, a wild parrot nest, and an overly peppy PE teacher. There is an impressive amount of material packed into a short space, without seeming rushed or incoherent. I enjoyed this a lot - it’s funny, well-written, and clever - up to a certain point.
I didn’t think this one worked quite as well as When You Reach Me - the bulk of the story was wonderful, but I had some issues with the ending revelations and outcome. They were cleverly set up, but opened up large cans of worms in terms of characterization and plausibility.
Huge spoilers for entire book below cut.
It took me a surprisingly long time to notice that Safer never left the apartment building, possibly because I listened to the audiobook over a period of two weeks.
Once the penny dropped, I couldn’t get past the fact that his agoraphobia was controlling his entire life and affecting his whole family, and yet his caring and educated parents had apparently never taken him to a therapist. It only needed one or two lines to fix that, like, “My parents repeatedly dragged me to therapists, but I absolutely refused to cooperate, and finally the therapists said they couldn’t do anything until I was ready.” Especially since agoraphobia is extremely treatable, and what Georges does with him to work on it is almost exactly what a therapist would have done.
Similarly, Georges’ parents seemed so sensible and loving that it seemed incredible that they would just let it slide and not even attempt to discuss the fact that he was in total denial about his mom’s condition, was refusing to visit or call her, and all communications with her had to be passed on via Scrabble tiles. Especially since it sounded like her life was in danger.
The revelation that did work well for me and felt plausible was the mislead in which Georges and the reader are led to believe that Safer is taking the game way too seriously, when actually Georges is the one who’s doing that.
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1121096.html. Comment here or there.